Today, the Rust Foundation is thrilled to announce the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund: a new initiative to provide consistent, transparent, and long term support for the developers who make the Rust programming language possible.
This announcement marks the beginning of the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund — an initiative we’ll shape in close collaboration with the Rust Project Leadership Council and Project Directors to ensure funding decisions are made openly and with accountability. In the months ahead, we’ll define the fund’s structure, secure contributions, and work with the Rust Project and community to bring it to life. This work will build on lessons from earlier iterations of our grants and fellowships to create a lasting framework for supporting Rust’s maintainers.
About the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund announcement, Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Rust Foundation Board Chair) said:
“Any open source project – especially one as widely used as Rust – cannot evolve, remain secure, or function at the most basic level without supporting its maintainers. Maintainers do the vital work of pull request reviews (which can be very labor-intensive), upgrades, refactorings, and much more. This fund will ensure these maintainers have the support they need to continue this vital work.“
The Health & Future of Rust
Open source sustainability has long been a central theme in our work and in many recent conversations across the Rust community, from how we collectively support critical open-source infrastructure to how we empower the people behind it to thrive.
Sustainability challenges across open source have only intensified in 2025, leaving many Rust maintainers uncertain about how to continue their essential work. The Rust Foundation is excited to develop this new fund to directly address the critical needs of the people building Rust in response to this challenge. Over the past several months, through ongoing board discussions and input from the Leadership Council, this initiative has taken shape as a way to help maintainers continue their vital development and review work, and plan for the future.
Even as technology changes rapidly and new opportunities emerge, Rust remains a crucial tool for building performant, safe, and forward-looking software. Investing in the people who make that possible is essential to meeting the growing demand for what Rust enables. We see it as our responsibility to ensure Rust maintainers can work sustainably and, in the process, shed light on the impact of supporting the often unseen work that keeps the Project running.
Supporting the people behind Rust has never felt more urgent. The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund is our commitment to act on that urgency transparently with ongoing Rust Project collaboration.
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