Concluding the Grant Funded Period: The Maintainers step into a network-led chapter
Dear Maintainers,
We’re excited to share this update as we complete the grant-funded chapter of The Maintainers, which has spanned from 2020 to 2025, with the generous support of Siegel Family Endowment and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This funding made it possible for us to create several fellowship iterations, host free public programs, offer engagement opportunities for community members, and support full-time staff and contractor support, all dedicated to supporting localized efforts to implement maintenance, repair, and care work on the ground.
As we look ahead, we’ll be introducing a leadership transition of The Maintainers, building from our summer 2024 publications of our Narratives of Change (Chapter 1 and Chapter 2). We see this new pathway as an opportunity to expand the network of Maintainers-related projects, further uplifting global maintenance and repair leaders, and supporting maintenance researchers and practitioners.
Many paths forward: How grant funding was critical to reach our current maturation
We’ve explored many future pathways for The Maintainers, and through this process, we’ve learned a lot about what it means to maintain The Maintainers itself: from having dedicated staff and awarding fellowships to providing honoraria for our members’ contributions, hosting free events, and overseeing a digital platform to disseminate knowledge and content about implementing maintenance practices. In addition to the core operations funding from the Siegel Family Endowment and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we’ve recently been able to diversify revenue streams through a contribution from The Culture of Repair to support the Steering Committee, a sponsorship for the Impact Fellows from VR (Ex) Change, along with some individual contributions from our wonderful community of Maintainers.
We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built together. Collaborating with our community since 2020 has shown us there’s no single “right” path to support a movement for maintenance thinking and action. All of the learnings, insights, and support over the years has brought us to this moment.
What’s changing?
After leveraging this grant period to build a solid project infrastructure for The Maintainers, we (Lauren and Liliana) will be stepping back from our roles as Co-Directors in July 2025, marking the transition of The Maintainers into a distributed-leadership model.
This decision was formalized in fall 2024 when our 2024-25 Steering Committee (composed of former Maintainers Fellows and Advisory Board members) expressed a strong desire and vision for the work to continue—though in a more scaled-down way—even as long-term funding remained uncertain.
The idea of a distributed leadership model has long been a part of this community’s vision, but it wasn’t possible to shape it fully until we had dedicated staff to facilitate the planning. Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with the Steering Committee and our program advisor Jessica Meyerson at Educopia to design this leadership transition so that our most engaged community leaders could step up. This interim Steering Committee will guide The Maintainers through the coming year and explore what global distributed leadership can look like in practice. We will share more about the details of this governance model and introduce you to our incredible Steering Committee in subsequent communications.
This past year has been about more than just wrapping up a grant-funded chapter—it’s been about preparing The Maintainers for a sustainable, more agile, and community-centered future. In close partnership with our 2024-25 Steering Committee, much of our focus has been on building the containers and streamlining the infrastructure that will allow the project to transition from a staffed initiative to a distributed leadership model, while staying rooted in its core values of care, repair, and maintenance. This intentionally flexible model will support lighter infrastructure while ensuring collective accountability and shared direction, matching our current moment and honoring the many hands that have shaped it.
Highlights from the year
- Archiving the entirety of The Maintainers’ body of work. We’ve wanted to ensure that the rich documentation created over the years via events, fellowships, tools, reflections, and more was preserved in a durable, open format. This year, we finally made that vision a reality. With encouragement from our peers in the information sciences and technical assistance from Educopia, we archived the entirety of The Maintainers’ published body of work from our WordPress site to the Open Science Framework. This free, open-source platform will allow current and future maintainers to access and build upon our work. The archive honors years of contributions and ensures that our collective knowledge remains accessible for learning, reuse, and inspiration.
- Refining our leadership model and gathering a fantastic Steering Committee. The 2024-25 Steering Committee is an intentionally convened group of advisors and former Movement Fellows, who combine localized practice with international network building. Together, we have spent countless hours working through our collective questions about the purpose and power of The Maintainers. These conversations have helped define the contours of our next phase, and we’ve designed a lightweight but intentional governance structure to carry the project forward with care. These conversations have helped define the contours of our next phase, and we’ve designed a lightweight but intentional governance structure to carry the project forward with care. The members of our Steering Committee represent leadership in different yet complementary areas of expertise, and you will learn more about them in upcoming communications.
- Compiling a Maintainers Study Guide to support the implementation of maintenance practices. As part of wrapping this chapter, we’ve been synthesizing our collective learning into a Maintainers Study Guide, set for release later this summer. Drawing from five years of fellowships, meetups, workshops, conferences, and cross-sector partnerships, the guide offers practical starting points for those interested in applying maintenance thinking in their own contexts. It will be a resource not only for reflection but also for activation—supporting new users as they enter the network and explore what maintenance as a practice and lens can mean for them.
Leadership Transition
We wanted to take a moment to reflect on the ethos and values we’ve tried to embed into the project, as Co-Directors of The Maintainers. For Lauren, this meant designing programs that expanded The Maintainers’ partnerships with universities, circular economy coalitions, and grassroots community groups, while emphasizing international collaboration to tackle the challenges of an interconnected world. For Liliana, it meant approaching operations and community engagement from a place of transparency, iteration, and celebration.
Together, our goal has always been to center the maintainers who often go unnoticed, and to create a space where they are seen, valued, and warmly welcomed. We hope this ethos will leave a lasting trace and that the Steering Committee will carry it forward as they steward the network into its next phase.
What’s to come?
The Maintainers isn’t ending – it’s evolving. And we’re not going far.
We remain committed to this work and will continue to support and represent The Maintainers’ vision. In our next updates, we’ll share more about the process of this transition, formally introduce the 2025-26 Interim Steering Committee, and share ways to stay connected and involved.
With care,
Lauren and Liliana
