Deadline: 12-Sep-23
Are you an NGO working to prevent unnecessary child-family separation in Bulgaria? Do you have a solution or service that has been successfully evaluated and proven, and could have an even greater impact? Would you like to gain the support needed to expand the reach of your solution in a sustainable way? If yes, then apply for the Scale Accelerator: Solid Ground for Children, a fully-funded scaling consultancy programme for NGOs.
Scale Accelerator: Solid Ground for Children seeks to double the number of people within Bulgaria who will benefit from impactful solutions for family stability and create collective and widespread change for, and alongside, the communities most affected by this issue – including Roma populations and people living with disabilities.
Made possible thanks to the support of Tanya’s Dream Fund, hosted by Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, Scale Accelerator provides fully subsidised consultancy support to scale up solutions that ensure children grow up in families where they can thrive.
The programme will provide you with intensive, tailored one-to-one support. By taking part, you will work collaboratively with their team of specialised scaling consultants as well as experts based in Bulgaria, who will offer hands-on technical assistance to help you:
- Build a foundational strategy for scale.
- Develop actionable and clear scaling and financial models, and build the internal operations needed to make the journey to scale achievable and financially sustainable.
- Engage national initiatives, the public sector and government responsible for child protection and family welfare in your approach to scaling up, so you can maximise your solution’s potential for long-term profound impact.
Focus Areas
- Preventing children being unnecessarily removed to an institution or other form of residential care. Focus areas include:
- Strengthening protective factors that help keep families together.
- Resourcing communities to respond proactively and in a timely manner to child wellbeing needs to prevent family separation.
- Incentivising gate keeping to tip the balance in favour of supporting family stability over separation.
- Examples of solutions include, but are not limited to:
- Parental skills, such as providing access to knowledge on parenting & child development; building parental resilience.
- Engaging and mobilising extended family support networks; promoting positive practices & structures in communities that support families.
- Mobilising locally led groups to identify child protection instances and ensure appropriate responses.
- Ensuring any separations are tested to ensure they are in the best interests of the child, and there are pathways to family- based alternative care.
Programme Route
- Expert Consultancy: up to 3 years of fully-subsidised, tailored consultancy for NGOs with a solution or service that has high potential for success at scale. The team of scaling consultants and local experts will provide hands-on technical assistance to identify how you can best achieve long-term, sustainable and widespread impact.
What you will get?
- Robust strategy and actionable plans
- An ambitious strategy for scale that you know works in reality and creates impact and value for all stakeholders at scale.
- A detailed model for scale which maps out how you will achieve your scale strategy in the real-world.
- Knowledge of how to best align and engage with governmental/EU initiatives and policies in your approach to scale.
- Financial sustainability at scale
- A well-defined financial model showcasing the costs and income associated with delivering your scale model.
- An opportunity to think critically about who might pay for your solution at scale, whether government, EU initiatives, corporate partnerships, foundations, INGOs, as well as a strong case to bring to funders and potential partners.
- Upskilled leadership and wider teams
- Develop a strong knowledge of their scaling methodology, and gain practical skills and knowledge to apply this within your organisation.
- Upskill your wider team within this methodology, so that they can use the principles and tools learned in their work, in other projects, in their future careers in the sector.
- Learn from other organisations on a similar journey.
- The mindsets, knowledge, and tools needed for scale
- An impact-driven mindset, focused on long-term outcomes, rather than short-term project outputs.
- A detailed understanding of what’s needed to accelerate the journey to scale in a sustainable way.
- An in depth knowledge of how to scale in partnership with others, reaching new locations otherwise unreachable, and making use of partners’ competencies, skills, and technologies.
Programme Details
- Duration
- Expert Consultancy: The consultancy will last up to 3 years, depending on your organisation’s needs. It will commence in November 2023.
- Support to participate
- The consultancy provided as part of this programme is fully subsidised by Tanya’s Dream Fund, and participants are not required to co-fund their participation.
- To ensure NGOs are not excluded from participating due to a lack of funds, limited staff capacity or other resource barriers, organisations selected for Expert Consultancy will be able to request resources and support to aid their engagement in the programme.
- Local Associates
- To ensure the support is rooted in a true understanding of the context NGOs are working in, they are delivering the programme in partnership with Bulgaria-based associates and advisors with local knowledge and experience. These individuals will play an integral role alongside Spring Impact’s scale experts, offering guidance, support and challenge to optimise the successful scale of solutions in the programme.
- Alumni networks
- Once selected for the programme, you will become part of the prestigious cohort of Scale Accelerator alumni and receive exclusive invitations to free training sessions, meet and learn from organisations on a similar journey, and gain networks of like-minded peers.
- Consulting team
- The team is composed of specialised scaling consultants, with diverse lived experience and working knowledge, and a wide ranging expertise in scaling with government, working in partnership with other NGOs addressing a common goal, facilitating community adoption, and more scaling approaches.
Criteria
- To be selected for Expert Consultancy, the solutions will be aimed at preventing children being unnecessarily removed to an institution or other form of residential care.
- Solutions that demonstrate clear evidence of impact and value for beneficiaries, have been proven to work in the Bulgarian context, and have documented evidence of their effectiveness.
- Solutions that have been running for at least 2 years.
- Solutions that have great potential to catalyse positive community transformation and system-wide impact when scaled, and are involving or intending to involve national initiatives and institutions or governmental bodies.
- NGOs with an ongoing track record of successful delivery and strong leadership capabilities and capacity to engage meaningfully in the consultancy support.
- They know that not all organisations will be able to meet every element of the criteria above, so they are also encouraging earlier-stage solutions that still require further innovating or adapting to apply.
For more information, visit Spring Impact.