Deadline: 5-Nov-21
The Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation (HCTF) has launched its Stewardship Grants Program that includes 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 their purposes as laid out in the Wildlife Act.
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.
Focus Areas
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 indirect 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.
- 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, their Board also considers the multi-year implications of investments.
* After 5 years of continued HCTF funding, a proponent can access another cycle of funding by reapplying using the Continuing – New 5-Year Cycle application form.
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
- Municipal/Regional government
- NGO (Non-government organizations)
- Academic Institutions
- Industry
- 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).
For more information, visit https://hctf.ca/grants/stewardship-grants/#overview