Deadline: Ongoing Opportunity
The Global Fund for Community Foundations (GFCF) is providing Small Grants aimed at stimulating and support the development of community philanthropy organizations around the world.
In the grantmaking, they try to strike a balance between consolidating relationships with longer-term grant partners and continuing to add new organizations into the network. The annual grantmaking depends to a large extent on the resources they have been able to mobilize from donors.
Most of the grants are aimed at strengthening individual organizations as trusted and effective grassroots grantmakers that can harness both local and external resources.
Funding Information
- Grants are normally in the range of U.S. $7,000 – $20,000 (size will depend on annual budget, nature of activities and whether the organization is already known to the GFCF).
Duration
- Grants are normally for an initial period of one year (follow-on funding may be possible).
Eligible Activities
- The grants support activities that:
- Strengthen the efforts of community philanthropy organizations to respond to, change mindsets around and build support for complex, sensitive or apparently intractable issues at the community level (e.g. social cohesion and other community divisions, environmental issues, women’s, youth, other minority rights, marginalized and vulnerable communities etc.).
- Strengthen the overall durability and effectiveness of community philanthropy organizations as trusted and rooted vehicles for people-led, people-owned development (whether around grantmaking systems, governance and management structures, fund development and sustainability, communications platforms, etc.).
Eligibility Criteria
- Grant Eligibility
- Is your organization:
- A community philanthropy organization?
- A community foundation?
- A women’s fund?
- An environmental fund?
- A national public foundation?
- A grassroots grantmaker?
- Any other kind of organization that identifies with the concept and practice of community philanthropy?
- Are you interested in:
- Shifting power and control closer to communities so that people have greater say – and the opportunity to act – when it comes to driving their own development?
- Recognizing, valuing, growing local assets and resources as a central pillar of community-owned and community-led development?
- Piloting and demonstrating new approaches – whether around governance, decision-making, local resource mobilization – that build local agency and foster new kinds of participation and ownership?
- Does your organization:
- Serve a particular community, whether geographic, issue or identity-based, and see it as a source of knowledge, assets, relationships and agency?
- Use grant making as a deliberate development strategy, which devolves power and resources to groups and organizations your community, because you believe that the best decisions and actions are rooted in and shaped by local experience and knowledge?
- Work to build a local culture of giving (philanthropy) and co-investment within the community you serve, whether as a strategy for flattening power, growing a local support base or constituency for community issues, increasing civic participation and horizontal accountability?
- Are you based in:
- Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, or Latin America and the Caribbean? (Please note, priority is given to those countries where access to other funding opportunities is limited. Applications from community philanthropy organizations representing disadvantaged communities in the Global North will also be considered on a case-by-case basis and will depend on the GFCF’s own funding restrictions).
- If the answer is “Yes!” to most of these questions, then you may be interested in knowing about the GFCF’s new grants programme.
- Is your organization:
For more information, visit GFCF.