Financial Assistance

Financial Assistance -------- Apply Now! **To submit a financial aid application**, sign up or log in to your account and proceed to the **Financial Aid** section of your account dashboard! Questions? Please don't hesitate to email: [pycon-aid@python.org](mailto:pycon-aid@python.org "pycon-aid@python.org") Timeline ----------------- - Financial aid application opens: August 13th, 2013 - Financial aid letters sent out to those giving talks: January 1st, 2014 - Financial aid applications closed: January 1st, 2014 - Financial aid awards sent: January 15th, 2014 ## Philosophy/Outreach Everyone - even the conference chair - pays for registration so that we can assist those who might not otherwise be able to attend. This includes major diversity and outreach programs through [PyLadies](http://www.pyladies.com/), [CodeChix](http://www.codechix.org/), and [Python User Groups](http://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups) to attract new speakers, students, and attendees. An interest­ing aspect of this is that PyCon, as a conference, offers a very generous financial aid program — this means that some attendees, speakers, tutorial presenters, etc have some, or in rare cases, all of their expenses such as flight, hotel and admission provided to them from the PyCon bud­get. PyCon goes out of its way to encourage people to apply for financial aid — even if we can’t cover all of your expenses, we will give you free admission based on need. The FA application process is simple, and straight­ for­ward. It’s also very liberal — the only caveat is that speakers at the conference “get bumped to the top” of the applications so that we don’t lose a good talk because of financial need. We use the FA bud­get to help individuals that would otherwise not be able to attend the conference. We also keep an eye towards diversity — for example in 2010 we had a specific grant pro­gram (funded by Google) for women to attend PyCon — which they did in amazing numbers! We also try to help more people with less money than less people with more money — we want to spread assistance out as much as possible. This is why FA requires room-sharing at the conference hotel, this is why we may only cover part of a given applicant’s costs — we want to help more people. Essentially, the financial aid program is the PyCon Outreach program - it's the community holding up the community and making itself accessible at this major event through these financial grants. It is the very spirit of the conference; make the information, knowledge, friendships and connection available to everyone or at least everyone we can budget in. Financial aid is core to the mission of the PSF - The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a [diverse](http://www.python.org/psf/diversity/) and international community of Python programmers. We are happy to say, that on most years, we very happily break our financial aid bud­get — mean­ing, if we have a positive out­look, we will gladly over­spend on financial aid and take less “profit” for the conference. The point of the conference is the community, it’s not about the conference! We help the community as much as we can by help­ing to cover the costs of people who would not other­wise be able to attend. Apply Now! **To submit a financial aid application**, sign up or log in to your account and proceed to the **Financial Aid** section of your account dashboard! Questions? Please don't hesitate to email: [pycon-aid@python.org](mailto:pycon-aid@python.org "pycon-aid@python.org")