In November 2017—a year earlier than originally planned due to the increased salience of cybersecurity issues after many high-profile breaches and growing threats to democratic institutions in a number of Western countries—the Hewlett Foundation’s board approved a renewal of our Cyber Initiative, budgeting $10 million per year for grantmaking through 2023.
Along with the renewal, the board approved a refined grantmaking strategy that builds on what has worked well during the first four years of the Initiative. In order to build a durable and enduring cyber policy field, our new grantmaking will focus on: (1) building a set of core institutions with sufficient depth of expertise to deliver solutions that take competing values and trade-offs to pressing cyber policy challenges seriously; (2) creating a talent pipeline to produce experts with the necessary mix of technical and non-technical skills and knowledge to staff these and other institutions, including government and industry; and (3) supporting the development of infrastructure to translate and disseminate the work of these institutions into forms that can be understood and used by decision makers and the public.