As you’ve probably noticed, Raspberry Pi is a rather unusual organisation. We have two functions: we make and sell tiny computers, and we promote children’s education. These activities support each other (all the money we raise from selling Raspberry Pis is put straight back into our charitable activities), but are in many ways separate, and it’s a real juggling act directing the two together. Back at the start of the year, we split the engineering and trading activities of the Foundation into a separate, wholly owned trading subsidiary, Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. The Raspberry Pi Foundation continues to run the charitable, educational side of things. Since then, I’ve been overseeing both organisations, but really, the two roles require two people doing them, and of necessity most of my attention has had to be devoted to the trading business.

Lance Howarth

With that in mind, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that Lance Howarth has joined us as Foundation CEO, and will be taking the lead on the Foundation’s charitable activities.

Lance spent a decade with ARM, latterly as EVP of Marketing and as a VP in the office of the CTO. He’ll be driving forward our educational mission, while I continue as CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) – you won’t see any big changes in my interactions with you here, at talks and so on. Hopefully we’ll be able to talk Lance into posting here on occasion too, to let you know what he and the board are up to.

You’re seeing some of the results of those charitable activities I’ve been talking about already – Clive Beale, our most excellent Director of Educational Development, is heading up the work on a growing corpus of free educational materials, running workshops, working with teachers, and with other charities; we’ve committed to take on some more people to work on our educational function too. We’re funding development of projects like Sonic Pi, the music programming environment we blogged about yesterday. We’re putting money into open educational resources, like Scratch and Squeak.

Lance will be growing our engagement with this sort of work, and I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the growing Raspberry Pi family. And if you want a lapel pin like his, you’ll find them in the Swag Store!