Deadline: 06-Nov-20
The Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation (HCTF) is seeking applications for its Stewardship Grants program 2020.
The Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation (HCTF) prefers stewardship projects that create stewards through community-based, hands on engagement programs, including Citizen Science. Stewardship projects may include some on-the-ground components such as habitat restoration.
HCTF recognizes the importance of environmental stewardship and invests in projects that create stewards. Stewards include individuals, practitioners, and community organizations who take responsibility for promoting, monitoring, conserving, and restoring ecosystems to ultimately result in enduring conservation outcomes for fish and wildlife and their habitats. Proposed projects must align with the purposes as laid out in the Wildlife Act.
Stewardship proposals:
- Should focus on engaging people to increase their knowledge, awareness, and understanding of fish, wildlife and their habitats.
- Should have the ultimate goal of changing behaviours and/or attitudes towards fish, wildlife and habitat conservation.
- May involve direct action in which people are stewarding the land (e.g., restoring a wetland, creating specific habitat features, removing invasive plants).
- May involve indirection action in which proponents work with others to achieve positive outcomes for fish and wildlife (e.g., landowner contact programs, citizen science, hands-on community engagement programs).
- Must be based on current best practices to increase conservation behaviours in the target audience.
- If your proposal involves outreach activities, be sure to describe who the specific target audience is and explain how you will reach your target audience.
- Where there are Citizen Science elements, proposals should also:
- Describe how the information collected will be used to directly address a conservation issue for fish and wildlife or their habitats.
- Describe what training methods will be provided for volunteers to ensure sound data collection (what format of training, how often, who will deliver).
- Describe what methods of Quality Assurance/Quality Control will be applied to data collected.
- Describe how data will be stored, managed and shared with decision makers or other relevant groups.
Funding Information
- Each year, HCTF provides approximately $600,000 in Stewardship Grants. There is no upper limit on funding requests but there is a 5-year limit to project funding. Stewardship Grant budgets typically range from $10,000 to over $80,000 annually, with an average grant of approximately $30,000.
- Note that projects requesting significantly higher amounts of funding will be reviewed with greater scrutiny to assess cost-effectiveness and to ensure the potential conservation benefits justify this level of funding. When reviewing proposals, the Board also considers the multi-year implications of investments.
Eligibility Criteria
- HCTF Stewardship grants are available to anyone who has who has a good idea that benefits fish, wildlife and habitat in British Columbia. Proponents can include:
- Provincial government agencies
- First Nations
- Local governments
- Community and conservation groups
- Universities and colleges, and
- Individuals (consultants who apply should provide credentials to indicate their abilities to complete the proposal)
- HCTF strongly encourages cost-shared proposals, and project leaders should explore the possibility of partnerships with other organizations or agencies (local, provincial or federal).
The following activities and types of projects are not eligible for Stewardship Grant funding:
- Non-applied research, such as research not related to the increased understanding of population baselines and conservation status of species, and/or research that does not identify key opportunities for restoration, enhancement, maintenance, or acquisition
- Training costs for project personnel
- Law enforcement activities
- Fish rearing, farming, stocking, or hatchery projects
- Wildlife Rescue Centres
- Captive breeding and rearing with the exception of activities that are a critical step toward population recovery
- Feeding of wildlife species with the exception of activities that are part of population recovery projects
- Control of wildlife species (note that they will consider control of invasive, non-native wildlife species)
- Salaries for regular Provincial government employees (wages for Auxiliary employees dedicated to the proposed project are eligible)
- Salmon-only projects that do not also bring benefit to freshwater and terrestrial species or habitats
- Marine projects outside of intertidal and estuary zones
- Mapping-only projects that are not integral to the development of a larger, eligible HCTF project
- Development or production of curriculum guidebooks or publication materials for fishing and hunting, tour activities
- Information projects on regulations or stocking
- Conferences
- Production or sponsorship of commercial programs
- Stand-alone interpretative services that are not integral to the development of a larger, eligible HCTF project
- Creation or management of stand-alone electronic databases, websites or file systems
Please note that all Stewardship Grant proposals have the same eligibility restrictions, deadlines, application requirements, and review criteria as E&R Grants, unless specified otherwise.
For more information, visit https://hctf.ca/grants/stewardship-grants/#overview