Ellie Bertani, President and CEO of GitLab Foundation, opens up below in a Q&A about her values, experience, and hopes for the GitLab Foundation.

We are excited to announce our first major grant of $2.9 million to Jobs for the Future (JFF), in collaboration with the Burning Glass Institute (BGI), to make sense of the rapidly growing market of short-term training programs.

In late 2022 and early 2023, our team devoted considerable time to developing an initial strategy for our giving. We met with dozens of experts in philanthropy, economic mobility, workforce development, international development, and impact measurement to help shape our thinking. We reviewed randomized controlled trial (RCT) data and other evidence to form a fact base that informed our strategy. We developed our first impact model and experimented with real and fictional data sets to help understand which interventions and investments types might maximize our impact.

The GitLab Foundation was launched in September 2022 with a mission to improve people’s lifetime earnings through access to opportunities, and a vision of a world in which one million more people can afford a better life.

With our origins rooted in GitLab, Inc, we looked to GitLab’s Tanuki logo for inspiration. The GitLab Tanuki (a Japanese raccoon dog) logo symbolizes the GitLab mission of “making it possible for everyone to contribute” with a smart animal that works in a group to achieve a common goal. This felt like a great starting point for the GitLab Foundation’s own brand development.