Civic Europe 2021: Seeking up to 20 ideas to tackle Societal Challenges at the local level

Deadline: 26-Apr-21

Civic Europe is looking for up to 20 ideas from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe that strengthen civic engagement as well as social and political participation to tackle societal challenges at the local level.

Funding Information

Civic Europe gives the winning ideas a funding opportunity and comprehensive non-monetary support from the end of 2021 until the end of 2022:

• The Civic Europe Idea Challenge supports up to 20 ideas with grants of up to €35,000 each.
• Moreover, and more importantly, following the idea of systems thinking, the CE Idea Challenge doesn’t merely support its winning ideas through funding. It leverages their potential impact through a combination of interconnected interventions in three different areas: community, capacity development and visibility, which they identified as relevant for sustainable change. They call this support system Circles of Change.

Who can Apply?

Project ideas should fulfil their selection criteria:

• Strengthen active citizenship on the local level
  • Project ideas should strengthen civic engagement and social and political participation on the local level, ideally by means of civic education.
  • Project ideas should foster collective action to address local issues and improve the quality of life of the community. They should help community members to be heard and become actively involved in the decision-making and implementation process of communal projects or local policies that affect them. Community members should be empowered to engage within their communities but also with political authorities and institutions. Project proposals should help citizens develop the knowledge, skills, values and motivation to participate actively in community, social and civic life.
  • Active citizenship can have various forms and shapes: voluntary activities and social projects, community engagement, active involvement in initiatives or organizations, electoral participation, awareness-raising activities (educational, communication or advocacy campaigns and work), direct participation in policy-making processes, etc.
• Engage in dialogue
  • They are looking for ideas that engage the community in dialogue around a locally relevant topic. The aim should be to bring people together who are usually not in contact and who bring differing or conflicting perspectives on a topic to the table. Ideally, our funded initiatives (try to) engage community members with profound disagreements in dialogue, such as:
    • those who are convinced and those who are doubtful of the value of civic actions;
    • those who trust in democratic institutions and those who are dissatisfied with them;
    • those who still strongly believe in democracy, those who question it, those who don’t (yet) have an opinion as well as those who retreat from politicsThey are looking for ideas that engage the community in dialogue around a locally relevant topic. The aim should be to bring people together who are usually not in contact and who bring differing or conflicting perspectives on a topic to the table. Ideally, our funded initiatives (try to) engage community members with profound disagreements in dialogue, such as
  • Project ideas should also strive for a multi-stakeholder dialogue and, in addition to community members and civil society actors, include local municipalities and administrations, politicians, governing parties, schools, local businesses or other interest groups affected by the issue.
• Location in a region with low civic cohesion
  • They aim to support initiatives active in communities and regions that are lacking civic cohesion. Low civic cohesion is often a phenomenon observed outside of large urban centers, in smaller cities and rural areas and characterized by:
    • few to no possibilities for social and political engagement,
    • few to no possibilities for civic education and lack of knowledge on civil rights, duties and political participation
    • lack of trust, acceptance, solidarity and connectedness among groups and individuals in the community
    • little civic infrastructure, like community centers, libraries, museums, public spaces to meet, civil society organizations, access to policy-making processes
• Lead to impact
  • They are looking for project ideas that aim to impact the development of the community positively for the long-term.
  • They are looking for people and projects that really want to understand the target group, the societal local challenge, the stakeholders involved in it and want to approach its solution in its entirety in order to see underlying patterns and ways to leverage the system. They think a systemic approach can bring impacts that are more than islands of success. Thus, project ideas should create a basis for sustainable change to foster civic cohesion, for example by engaging in a multi-stakeholder dialogue, by building bridges between conflicting groups in the community or by empowering members of the community to speak aloud, advocate for their interests and actively participate in policy-making processes on local, national or even European level.

Eligibility Criteria

• Non-profit legal status: Applicants must be a non-profit organization, which, as a corporate body (“registered organization”), fulfils all the requirements of German law on non-profit organizations. According to German law an organization is only non-profit if it exclusively and directly pursues charitable purposes. Possible organizational forms, depending on national legal regulations concerning charitable/non-profit legal status, include NGOs, cooperatives, collectives, associations, clubs, a non-profit private limited company, non-profit public limited company, non-for-profit corporations, etc.
• Eligible Countries: Civic Europe will fund non-profit organizations from: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.

For more information, visit https://civic-europe.eu/idea-challenge/call-for-ideas-2021/