docs(blog): add community contributions post (#6172)

Author: mark-wiemer

docs/src/content/docs/blog/community-contributions.mdx

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+---
+description: Notable changes between Mocha 12 RC 1 and 11.7.4.
+title: Community contributions
+date: 2026-07-24T02:45:00Z
+excerpt:
+  "Today, we are happy to announce that Mocha will be donating $5,000 each to four different community projects, for a total of $20,000 donated to the modern JavaScript community.
+  This works to match our [Collective Funds Guidelines](https://github.com/collective-funds/guidelines/blob/v0.1.1/GUIDELINES.md) recommendation of donating 20% to dependencies and community projects."
+---
+
+Mocha has been a stable of the web development ecosystem for over a decade.
+Over those years, it's received over $200,000 in financial contributions, and continues to receive tens of thousands of dollars a year from its many generous donors.
+We are grateful to have been able to pay our maintainers well, and we recognize that very few open-source projects are in this position.
+
+However, the Mocha project is no longer cutting edge or under significant feature development.
+We believe the approximately $90,000 in our Open Collective balance would be better spent on more modern, active projects that don't receive consistent donations the way Mocha does.
+
+Today, we are happy to announce that Mocha will be donating $5,000 each to four different community projects, for a total of $20,000 donated to the modern JavaScript community.
+This works to match our [Collective Funds Guidelines](https://github.com/collective-funds/guidelines/blob/v0.1.1/GUIDELINES.md) recommendation of donating 20% to dependencies and community projects.
+We made these donations a few days ago, and all have now been fully processed.
+
+## Projects We're Sponsoring
+
+Our criteria for sponsoring a project were projects that:
+
+- Mocha and its users directly benefit from
+- Have been under active development and maintenance for >1 year
+- Are not already funding us or any projects our maintainers are receiving sponsorship from
+- Are truly independent and open source (not primarily backed or owned by a company)
+
+Additionally, we ensured that each project could significantly benefit from more funding, and we were happy to find that all candidates used Open Collective for transparency.
+Mocha has directly benefited from the contributions of each of these projects, and we're proud to support their ongoing development.
+
+### [Knip](https://knip.dev)
+
+Knip has become _the_ standard tool in web development for decluttering JavaScript and TypeScript projects.
+It's helped us as well as many other projects catch all sorts of unused code and dependencies.
+In doing so, Knip both improved our ease of developing Mocha as well as reduced the amount of code we ship to users.
+
+### [Node.js](https://nodejs.org)
+
+Node.js is the most popular JavaScript runtime and the primary way users run Mocha.
+It is mature and stable, as well as the only major JavaScript runtime that is truly independent (its financial entity is the [OpenJS Foundation](https://openjsf.org), a 501(c)(6) nonprofit).
+Node.js sets the standard for how server-side users run JavaScript, and we're happy to have collaborated with them on recent changes such as `require(ESM)`.
+
+### [Prettier](https://prettier.io)
+
+Prettier is the de facto standard for formatting in JavaScript.
+We use it in Mocha on all of our source files to eliminate time wasted debating or manually applying whitespace preferences.
+Prettier continues to lead the ecosystem for research and development into how to properly format web code.
+
+### [unified](https://unifiedjs.com)
+
+The unified collective manages a large suite of packages and specifications for managing content and structured data.
+This includes [MDX](https://mdxjs.com), the language powering the content of mochajs.org and many other sites, as well as assorted tools such as [remark](https://remark.js.org) that process Markdown for other tools.
+Much of the modern Markdown tool chain is powered by unified.
+
+## More Sponsorships To Come
+
+This will not be the only set of community sponsorships to come out of Mocha over the next few years.
+After Mocha 12 finishes releasing this fall, we plan on taking another look at the ecosystem and setting up larger and/or recurring sponsorships.
+We look forward to "paying it forward"--both figuratively and literally--to help other projects push forward the practice of web development.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Thank you, as always, for your continued financial contributions that have made this donation possible.
+We encourage you to support any of the projects above directly, as they all do amazing work.
+
+For any and all feedback, please reach out on [Discord](https://discord.gg/KeDn2uXhER) 🤎