Deadline: 25 June 2020
The Open Society Foundations’ Education Support Program, Early Childhood Program, and the Open Society Initiative for Europe are inviting applications for its Grassroots and Parent Activism in Education 2020 call for proposals.
The call aims to support the programmatic work of grassroots-level civil society groups to address the education challenges of vulnerable children aged 0-18 from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds or with unique educational needs.
They can pursue this goal through a variety of means; examples may include, but are not restricted to the following:
- Practices/Models
- Introducing and strengthening classroom and school/preschool-level practices that foster equity in education
- Developing innovative models of improving or expanding education opportunities for vulnerable school and pre-school age children which can be in-person, online, or a combination
- Documenting and sharing good practices used for the education of vulnerable children or children with special needs during the homeschooling period, including online, low technology and no-technology solutions
- Developing and advocating for solutions that support children’s learning gaps as a result of the pandemic
- Securing and expanding joint learning opportunities of vulnerable children and children from more secure backgrounds
- Documenting good practices, guides and strategies around issues of child protection, as the pandemic increases the risk of violence, exploitation, and abuse against vulnerable children
- Collecting lessons learned from the challenges of the COVID-19 affected home learning environment
- Agency, with special focus on parent activism:
- Strengthening the agency of students and educators in fighting discrimination and improving both access and equitable education provision
- Supporting self-organizing efforts of parents in fighting discrimination and improving equitable access to quality education/preschool education
- Supporting parents’ joint actions in advocating and addressing issues of COVID-19 related homeschooling, and how does it affect the educational success of marginalized children
- Improving access of parents from disadvantaged backgrounds to school governance bodies and policy-making
- Facilitating improved teacher-parent relations and collaborations, especially where parents from disadvantaged backgrounds are concerned
- Attitudes:
- Challenging negative stereotyping, prejudice and racism among educators, school/preschool administrators, students, children and parents;
- Claiming public space in education:
- Articulating and communicating key messages regarding issues of inequality and injustice in education exacerbated even more by the situation with COVID-19 to the broader public as well as local, county and national policymakers
- Monitoring the response of educational institutions towards the COVID-19 impact on education and advocate for targeted support to children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with unique educational needs.
Funding Information
- Organizations/ informal groups can apply for a period of 12 months for up to 20,000 USD, with eligible expenses starting from September 2020.
Eligibility Criteria
To be considered for support, organizations/informal groups applying for this call for proposals must meet all of the following criteria:
- Programmatic Criteria:
- address educational equity challenges of vulnerable school and pre-school age children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds or with unique educational needs.
- Engagement Criteria:
- envision activities that build on the grassroots activism of local stakeholders;
- work at the community level and make use of the engagement of community members and volunteer support.
- Technical Criteria:
- implement project activities in Hungary;
- be of a not-for-profit character if established as a legal entity, and have a non-profit public benefit purpose if applying as an informal group;
- be an informal group with not-for-profit aims, consisting of at least three active individuals older than 18 years old, if applying as an informal group;
- work at the community level and make use of volunteer support.
For more information, visit https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/grassroots-and-parent-activism-in-education