Fiscal sponsorship: Ella Kaye & rainbowR

Ella Kaye from rainbowR was an OLS Incubation Fellow from December 2025 to August 2026. We asked Ella to tell us about her work with rainbowR and how OLS helped her support the organisation:

Tell us about rainbowR!

rainbowR is a community which connects, supports and promotes LGBTQ+ folks who code in R and spreads awareness of LGBTQ+ issues through data-driven activism.

Tell us about yourself: how long have you been involved with rainbowR? What is your role?

Professionally, I’m a Senior Research Software Engineer at The University of Birmingham, where I work primarily to enable the next generation of contributors to R. I love R and the R community! I co-founded rainbowR back in 2017. The community went dormant a couple of years later. I revived it in 2022 and have been running it since then. Formally, I’m the chair of the leadership committee. There are lots of wonderful people involved in running rainbowR across the leadership, conference and CoC committees, and I’m keen for someone else to take on the role of chair soon.

What did rainbowR achieve during your Incubation Fellowship with OLS?

My OLS incubation fellowship overlapped with my SSI fellowship. My main aims were to nurture rainbowR and make it sustainable for the long term. Part of that was formalising the community governance structures and processes, and the other was delivering a rainbowR conference. During the OLS fellowship, rainbowR held an inaugural AGM and voted to adopt a proposed constitution and elect a leadership committee. We also held a two-day conference, which was a massive undertaking and a huge success!

How did fiscal sponsorship help you achieve those aims?

The fiscal sponsorship enabled rainbowR to raise money from the conference via donations and solidarity payments - OLS handled all the financial side for us. As rainbowR grows, so do our costs - the money we raised will cover us for at least the next couple of years. At the time, we were going through the process of formalising our governance so we could apply for our own bank account, but it wasn’t possible to align the timing to have that in place for the conference.

What would you have done differently during your fellowship?

I went along to a couple of the Friday co-working sessions. I really enjoyed chatting with other OLS folks at those, and they had lots of good suggestions and helpful recommendations for the conference. I wish I had attended more of them!

What is rainbowR up to now? Where can readers find out more about your next steps?

After the success of the conference earlier this year, we have just announced that we will run the conference again in 2027. We continue to run our monthly meet-ups and quarterly buddies scheme. The community as a whole continues to grow - we’ve welcomed ten new members in the last month. Find out more about us at https://rainbowr.org. If you’re LGBTQ+ and code in R and like the sound of hanging out with other such folks, join us!