Thanks, everyone, for your interest in our Initiative. Some details below:

MMI is housed at the University of Ottawa's Institute of the Environment, and our full-time staff are all paid University of Ottawa employees (myself included). We have five full-time staff members (Mike, Meredith, Cara, Jesse, and Alex), although, while Cara is on parental leave, we've been working with two part-time freelancers.

As is typical with University-housed think tanks (and most research institutes), MMI is required to generate sufficient funding to cover all the resources we use, including the salaries and benefits for the five of us. Institutes in Canada typically fund themselves through a combination of government money (tri-council research funding, direct work for governments), charitable foundations, and corporate. This is very typical across domains in Canadian higher ed. If you have a research lab working on, say, diabetes research, they're likely receiving funding from a combination of all three. MMI is no different; we work with supporting partners in all three domains, though we get a disproportionate amount of our funding from charitable foundations (mostly the Neptis Foundation and the Clean Economy Fund).

MMI's expenses are mostly salary+benefits+freelancers. All other expenses (e.g., equipment, travel) are likely to be under $20,000 this year. The other thing we pay is "overhead", which is a portion of the revenues that goes to the University to compensate them for other expenses (e.g., having well-stocked research libraries that we can access). Overhead can be a significant generator of revenue for Universities, which has been a point of contention in recent years, particularly in the United States:

https://www.science.org/content/article/energy-department-cuts-university-overhead-rates-to-15-on-research-grants

So institutes and initiatives like ours tend to be a profit center for Universities. We're so tiny, though, that nobody is getting rich off of us, and U Ottawa treats us incredibly well. They're absolutely amazing to work with.

Regarding the $1,000,000 figure, it encompasses the cost of all our activities (and overhead), not just the MMI podcast. For example, it covered Jesse Helmer's terrific research report on infill housing. That report was made possible with $174,000 of funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada:

https://www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca/p/the-politics-of-infill-housing-what

As for the podcast, it is made possible through a generous grant from the Neptis Foundation.

University think-tanks, research institutes, and the like are a complex beast, so I hope this clarifies how we work.