We just launched our instance at https://beehaw.org not too long ago.
However, a good number of people have been asking questions like this for the past several days on our Discord server.
P.S. - I will have a big surprise (hopefully…if all goes well) for the Lemmy community in March.
In my opinion, the most useful thing you can do is contribute your own time and skill. Whether by coding, reporting issues, translating, running/moderating an instance or something else. All of these things can be done effectively by volunteers, and in fact its much easier than trying to hire an additional person with donation money (we tried that and it didnt really work out).