Hey guys,
Just in the spirit of transparency, here’s how we were funded, and spent money for our first full financial year.
Yep. It’s not much. TBH our main (and only) funder up till March last year was our dear old friends at the Malaysian Centre for Constitutionalism and Human Rights (MCCHR). Yes, the same folks who worked with Sinar Project on the first version of MyMP. TLDR they gave us RM45,000 to build the first version of MyMP, and have been giving us about RM38,000 per year to keep the lights on. Only a few freelancers including our volunteer manager, accountants, company secretaries, scrapers, designers and programmers received anything resembling a salary. Our dear founder, Chak, has not.
But all that changed after March 2023
In March 2023, we received confirmation of a grant of USD20,000 from the National Democractic Institute. The grant was to run a series of workshops across Malaysia to educate youth on the parliamentary process, and what makes a good MP. Along the way, we might’ve also taught them a thing or two about how to use data in interesting ways 🙂
Most of the money went to hosting and organising the events. However, NDI also allows a decent portion for running costs, so we hired a full-time volunteer manager, and started paying a salary for Chak as well. In the months following, we were also contracted by IDEAS Malaysia to help on the very very cool PANTAU KUASA project.
In total we were funded around RM158,000 in 2024.
That concluded in September 2023, so you’ll be seeing a wee bit more activity in our 2023-2024 accounts.
And… the current situation
Unfortunately in 2024, we have yet to secure meaningful funding. Thankfully, we were frugal in our spending so we have about RM50k left in the bank to keep the lights on, but for the time being, MyMP is again in survival mode (no more salaries for now). We will keep doing volunteer rounds for HANSARDs maybe twice a year, and update info as and when our scrapers are free.
What we REALLY want to do is…
- Work with the community to build a TRANSPARENCY/Asset Declaration Framework for Malaysian politicians
- Realise our dream of building Fantasy Parlimen!
- Build a tool for journalists and researchers to scour through HANSARDs and create visualisations on their own
We have sent applications out to several organisations, but so far are coming up empty. If you can help…
- Find us a sugar daddy/mommy/nonbinary
- Let us know of funds we can apply for
- Help us scrape data in your free time
- Volunteer!
- Donate!
Also, if you have any questions with regards to our accounts or how we’re funded, please reach out to [email protected] and we’ll try to be as transparent as we can.