Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust: Seeking Proposals for ‘Empowering Vulnerable Communities’ Program

Deadline: Various

The Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust is currently accepting project proposals to be supported under its November 2017 funding cycle “Empowering Vulnerable Communities”.

This Call for Proposals specifically seeks to strengthen civil society and community efforts to develop individually and collectively; to empower citizens participation in governance and policy issues and enable effective engagement with stakeholders, particularly government, at local, regional and national levels, to ensure that its policies and programmes effectively responds to community needs.

Grant Amount & Duration

The minimum amount that may be requested is LKR 1,000,000 and the maximum cannot exceed LKR 5,000,000.
The minimum grant duration is 12 months and the maximum is 24 months. NTT reserves the right to consider requests above the maximum amount and/or grant duration under exceptional circumstances.
Applications requesting LKR 3,000,000 – 5,000,000 to initially submit the Concept Note only.

Deadlines

Applications up to LKR 3,000,000: 2 January 2018
Applications between LKR 3,000,000 – 5,000,000: 20 December 2017 (Concept Notes Only)

Types of Projects

Programme area 1: Inclusive Economies
- Promoting socio-economic empowerment in post war rebuilding and rehabilitation initiatives;
- supporting documentation, discourse, advocacy, and research on rights – or its denial –over economic resources, including land;
- supporting inclusive and accessible markets, value and supply chains for local/marginalized communities and expanding economic opportunities for local/marginalised communities;
- Evaluation of current policies, methodologies and programmes in the areas of livelihood support, vocational training, micro-finance;
- Strengthening CSOs engaged in economic empowerment of communities
Programme area 2: Gender mainstreaming
- Addressing structural and systemic factors that impede equal opportunities for women; supporting initiatives that advocate integrating the gender perspective to the content of different policies and addressing issues of participation related to post war rehabilitation;
- Strengthening service provision, advocacy, discourse and redress systems addressing Gender based violence;
- Supporting discourse, advocacy, and research on women’s rights to employment, land, resources etc aimed at supporting decision making and practical measures that improves the lives of communities;
- Providing opportunities to women to strengthen leadership and participation in community and public life.
Programme area 3: Strengthening the rights of marginalized communities
- Supporting academic and policy discourse, advocacy, and research that critiques dominant approaches to macro-micro economic policies with a view to promoting equality, equity and social justice;
- Establishing and strengthening systems that enable identifying and documenting violations of right abuses and narratives of communities;
- Supporting marginalized/vulnerable communities to have better access to legal aid support and services including psychosocial counselling;
- Promoting human rights and justice, freedom of expression, right to information, rights of migrant workers, plantation workers and families and other marginalized/vulnerable communities in both urban and rural areas;
- Securing disability rights – access to information and facilities, awareness of their rights, livelihoods training and assistance for persons with disabilities (PWD);
- Providing opportunities to youth to strengthen leadership and participation in community and public life.
Programme area 4: Strengthening CSOs ability to address current and emerging issues
- Supporting effective engagement of CSOs or individual activists (especially women activists) with the community by providing exposure to different delivery mechanisms (public discourse, research, training and networking, for example);
- Strengthening organisations working on gender, ethnicity and religious minorities to better address intersectionality;
- Publishing, translating and disseminating materials addressing any of the above programme areas to address needs and gaps (these may be from/to Sinhala, Tamil or English).

Eligibility Criteria

Potential applicants are invited to submit proposals that are in line with the above mentioned thematic programme areas. Projects may be implemented in any part of Sri Lanka, without geographical constraints.
Sub-granting is not allowed; applicants must clearly demonstrate that the proposed activities will be implemented by them and not subcontracted or sub-granted to a third party (exceptions would be resource persons, consultants or third party specialists who will need to be subcontracted for certain activities).
Only one application per organisation will be entertained (applying alone or in partnership with one/more other organisations).
- Eligible recipients include duly registered community-based organisations (CBOs), local nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and local not-for-profit organisations.
- Grant applications from individuals will not be accepted.
- Organisations without a valid registration will not be considered. (Exceptionally, applications will be considered if the applicant applies in partnership with another facilitating organisation which has a valid registration.) The facilitating organisation must comply with all the eligibility criteria of this Call.
- Applicants who have an existing grant with NTT may apply but the application will only be reviewed upon the satisfactory conclusion of the existing grant.
- NTT will not fund organisations that have not shown good performance implementing previous projects funded by NTT or by any other donors.
- NTT will not consider applications received from government institutions or departments. NTT will not fund organisations which have political affiliations.