It isn't easy to build a strong community. Many event organizers work to bring people together for Drupal. Community Cultivation Grants are one tool to make the work a little easier. With a grant, you can strengthen the local community. You can help drive the adoption of Drupal.

Drupal Association members fund these grants. A few grant recipients have told us their stories. I'd like to share more about what has happened since the grants were awarded.

Andrey from DrupalCamp Moscow

Team DrupalCamp MoscowThe DrupalCamp Moscow 2014 organizers have connected with the organizers of other camps — DrupalCamp Siberia (in Novosibirsk in 2015) and DrupalCamp Krasnodar (in September 2016). They've shared experiences to inspire the communities in these other Russian cities.

Andrey tells us, "In Moscow, we don't have any large companies which offer Drupal services. Our community organizes all the local events. After DrupalCamp Moscow 2014, we've held more events than ever before. 6 meetups, 22 small meetings, a D8 Release Party and one Drupal burgers event have happened. We've had Drupal specialists from other cities of Russia and the world come to visit. New participants are always welcome here and we are seeing more and more of them."

Ricardo from Drupal Mexico City

DrupalCamp Mexico City 2014 group photoRicardo tells us, "We held another Drupal camp in Mexico City in 2015 with 250 attendees. In 2016, our dear fellows from Axai did the same in Guadalajara.

This year, we went off the island, just like Drupal 8 has, and we organized an even broader PHP event. It was amazing. The response was fantastic, we broke all our attendance records. We've grown the PHP Mexico community & PHP Way meetups and now have 1,000 members. Our attendees could become new Drupalists. But we expect to see new Drupalists come from the Symfony world.

We decided to have only one Drupal event in Mexico per year. In 2016, it was held in Guadalajara. If nobody else wants to organize an event at 2017, we'll probably do it again. If we organize the next Drupal event, it will probably happen together with a PHP event once again. Ultimately, community growth should be in concordance with demand growth. This hasn't happen here in CDMX, we are hopeful that it will."

Martha from Drupal Guadalajara

DrupalCamp Guadalajara group photoFrom Martha: "We attended DrupalCamp Costa Rica in September and continue being connected to the Drupal Latino Community. After Guadalajara camp, there is more local Drupal awareness. Our company has received training and quote requests since the camp."

Community Cultivation Grants do more than build connections in our community and grow our contributors. They also to help drive the adoption of Drupal.

Ivo from Drupal Roadshow Bulgaria

Drupal Roadshow BulgariaIvo says, "Since the roadshow, there we've met our goal of running a Drupal Academy. We now run the biggest Drupal Course at Software University in Bulgaria. We have more than 1200 registered students. Our activities were featured in the Bulgarian National Television.
We are also proud of another result of the roadshow. One of the larger Drupal shops in Bulgaria opened their second office in a small town. We introduced Drupal there."

Tom from DrupalCamp Vietnam (2016)

DrupalCamp Vietnam 2016 group photoTom tells us, "I'm an entrepreneur and angel investor. Helping people become prepared for the digital enterprise is fulfilling to me. I want to spend more time coaching young developers with IT career decisions. To help get them learn how to use Drupal as a versatile data/content modeling tool. Which can act as a key platform to integrate with many other FOSS too. Including MERN stack, Hadoop, Spark, Docker, Openstack, etc.

Technology is always changing. What sticks is the experience you gain by contributing to an open-source community such as Drupal."

We're excited to see grant recipients building relationships in our community. You can connect with community and make more grants possible by joining the Drupal Association today.