Global Call for NGOs! Receive Financial and Capacity-building Support for your Innovative Project

Deadline: 2-Dec-22

Applications are now open for the Intercultural Innovation Hub.

UNAOC and BMW Group, supported by Accenture, mobilize their resources, time and networks to strengthen the selected projects. This new model of collaboration between the UN and the private sector creates deeper impact, as all partners provide their respective expertise to ensure the sustainable growth of each project.

Objectives

• The main objective of the Intercultural Innovation Hub is to connect, empower and elevate innovative civil society organizations. IIH identifies and supports innovative projects that are already being implemented and have potential for expansion and replication. Selected organizations should implement the project with the overall goal to sustainably expand and adapt to other contexts. Projects presented within this call must have shown successful outcomes during at least its first year of implementation.
• Recipients will benefit from a comprehensive one-year capacity-building program aimed at strengthening their work. The support program will consist of funding, training and capacity-building, customized support and mentoring, and membership to the “Intercultural Leaders”. After the one-year support program, alumni of the IIH will still benefit from their Intercultural Leaders membership, which gives access to a community of change makers working in the field of intercultural dialogue.

Participating and Increasing Impact

The Intercultural Innovation Hub is focused on supporting projects that promote gender equality, counter violent extremism, hatred, and prejudice, and advocate for art, culture and sports as vectors for social cohesion and diversity, through:

• Financial support for sustainable growth: To leverage the social impact of the selected projects, up to ten finalists will receive up to 20,000 USD each to help their initiative scale up sustainably.
• One-year capacity-building program: UNAOC and BMW Group with the support of Accenture, will provide the recipients a year-long series of capacity-building workshops and customized support.
• Membership to the “Intercultural Leaders” community: Participants will be part of a global network of changemakers working in the fields of social inclusion and diversity.

Benefits

• Alumni will become members of “Intercultural Leaders”, a project of UNAOC in partnership with the BMW Group. Intercultural Leaders is an exclusive skills and knowledgesharing platform for civil society organizations and young leaders that work on addressing cross-cultural tensions. Through an innovative online system, Intercultural Leaders harnesses the solidarity of its members to maximize the impact of their work and help them foster cross-cultural understanding and cooperation. Intercultural Leaders allows its members to:
  • Be part of a unique community of change makers;
  • Connect with other organizations and individuals, learn about other projects, programs and initiatives and collaborate with them;
  • Post their organization’s needs and receive support from experts, enabling organizations to maximize their impact;
  • Get notified of opportunities: competitions, grants, conferences, etc.

Funding Information

• Recipients will receive funding to be used for project expansion and/or replication of their project. The total amount of the funding pool is up to USD 200,000 distributed evenly between the finalists.

Eligibility Criteria

• Organizations that submit a project to the competition need to fulfill each and every one of the following criteria to be deemed eligible:
  • Organizations must be registered as a not-for-profit organization, such as a non-governmental organization, charitable organization, research and educational institution, labor union, indigenous group, faith-based organization, professional association, foundation and local or municipal branches of government.
  • Applying organizations must have been operational for a minimum of 2 years before November 2022; with funding base and project implementation (i.e. the organization must show registration as non-profit in their country of operation by November 2020 or earlier).
  • Applying organizations must be managing a project focused on promoting intercultural dialogue and fostering diverse and inclusive societies, and who are willing to expand their range of action. Examples include projects in the fields of promoting gender equality, preventing xenophobia, violent extremism, and hate speech, promoting the use of sport, art and culture as tools to drive social change and foster social inclusion.
  • The applying organization must have the willingness to expand the range of action of the project with UNAOC, the BMW Group and Accenture.
  • Organizations that have previously received any UNAOC support are not eligible to apply to the Intercultural Innovation Hub.
  • Projects that have been submitted to previous editions of the Intercultural Innovation Hub and were not selected, are eligible and encouraged to apply again. However, applying organizations cannot have been participants of previous editions of the UNAOC Marketplace of Ideas or BMW Group Awards.

For more information, visit https://interculturalinnovation.org/the-project/who-can-apply/