We’re excited to help grow the Gem Fellowship program, which is entering its second year. Learn more in the gem.coop announcement here.

The fellowship helps the open source Ruby community grow and thrive, by providing funding to the developers who build, maintain, and improve the open source tools they make freely available to the Ruby community.

The Spinel team is obviously deeply invested in the health of Ruby open source and the developers that maintain it. We’re not only long time maintainers, and builders of open source tools, we rely on them for our work.

We’re excited to contribute to fundraising efforts for this program.

The program awarded 8 fellowships last year, and our goal is to raise $150,000 and fund at least 15 this year.

We hope to see companies show their support of Ruby open source by becoming sponsors and helping us exceed our goal. The minimum amount to be named as a sponsor is $5,000 but we accept any increment of $5,000. Your company can become a headline sponsor starting at $100,000.

This is an excellent way to show that your company is a pillar of the Ruby open source community, and cares about the developers who keep it going. All funds go to maintainers, so you also get to see your impact very directly.

“The Gem Fellowship has been an absolute boon for the Bridgetown project. We couldn’t have gotten our first-party Willamette theme for documentation and publishing all polished up and out the door without the grant, and now Willamette is deployed to production by a number of parties. Open source projects which are community-supported rather than sponsored by a single corporation are often at the mercy of who may or may not show up to participate. The Gem Fellowship program showed up for us in a major way, and for that we are eternally grateful.”

- Jared White, 2026 Gem Fellowship winner

If you’re already onboard, you can sponsor today by visiting the sponsor page here. If you have more questions or want to learn more about the program, please reach out. Both André Arko, CEO of Spinel, and Mike Perham, the creator of Sidekiq (and Gem Fellowship headline sponsor), would be happy to set up a call to talk more.

We look forward to partnering with you.

-The Spinel Team