Commonwealth Foundation Grant 2018

Submissions for the Commonwealth Foundation Grant 2018 is now open!

With more than 2.3 billion citizens, the Commonwealth provides a potentially huge pool of ideas for advancing societies.
The Foundation offers grants of up to £200,000 over four years in support of innovative project ideas and approaches that seek to strengthen the ability of civic voices to engage with governments and that have the potential to improve governance and development outcomes through their active participation.

The Foundation believes in the power of stories and storytelling for social change and will award grants for creative approaches that have the potential to influence public discourse.

The selection process is highly competitive and selected projects will have been designed to undertake work that has the potential to lead to one or more of the outcomes in the Foundation’s strategic logic model.

The Foundation’s programme teams are all involved in shaping the focus of the call for proposals. An internal review process, including long-listing by the Grants team followed by a short listing process involving all programme teams, prepares a final list of applications that is then submitted to the Grants Committee. Final decisions on which projects to support are made by the member states represented on the Foundation’s Grants Committee.

The Commonwealth Foundation’s mission is to support civic voices to share their stories, learn and act together and influence the institutions that shape people’s lives.

The Foundation works to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development with effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels of participatory governance which implies creative and constructive engagement between civil society and other governance stakeholders.

The Foundation see their programmes, contributing to Sustainable Development Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

The Foundation is interested in supporting projects that strengthen civic voice so that it:

  • Is more effective in holding governance institutions to account
  • Enhances involvement in policy processes
  • Shapes public discourse
  • Your project should address one or both of the following outcomes and may include the use of creative expression to achieve project aims:
    • Stronger civic voices engaging in policy processes to hold government to account:
      Your project will strengthen the capacity of civic voices in contributing to:

      • monitoring government commitments and action
      • supporting the implementation of the sustainable development goals or other international agreements, and related local and national policy agendas
      • Advocating policy priorities to government that address gender and other power imbalances, disparities and discrimination
      • Strengthening participatory methods of engaging in regional, national and local governance processes
      • Raising awareness and advocating for specific policy issues
    • Public discourse more reflective of less-heard voices
      • Your project will support less heard voices to contribute to public discourse on development issues
      • Your project will support less heard voices to access policy spaces and/or platforms with the potential to amplify voices and influence public discourse

All proposals must ensure that the cross cutting theme of gender is mainstreamed throughout the project.

 

Benefits

The Foundation offers grants of up to £200,000 over four years in support of innovative project ideas and approaches.

Eligibilities

  • You are a registered not for profit civil society organisation. CSOs may apply for a grant in partnership with another CSO. All CSOs involved in implementing a Commonwealth Foundation grant must be registered organisations and included as partners in the application. You and, when applicable, partner(s) must be based in a Commonwealth Foundation member country and the project take place in an eligible Commonwealth Foundation member country (Please see Annex 1 to the Guidelines)
  • Your grant application is for £50,000 per year or less
  • You are applying for funding for up-to 4 years
  • Your project has not yet started. Applications must be for a completely new project, or for a new phase of an ongoing project. Grants cannot be used to co-fund projects that are mid-cycle.
  • You do not currently have a grant from the Commonwealth Foundation
  • The average of your total income over the last 2 years is less than £3 million
  • Your project addresses one or both of the Commonwealth Foundation’s outcomes (see Guidelines).
  • You will provide the following supporting documents as part of your application:
    • egistration certificate for your organisation
    • The most recent audited accounts for your organisation (they must include both the accounts and the opinion of the external auditor who has certified them; they should not be more than 2 years old)
    • A complete logic model using the Commonwealth Foundation template
    • Registration certificate for all partner organisations, if applicable
  • * These countries are eligible to apply but project activities must be implemented in eligible countries in this list that do not have asterisks beside them.
Eligible Regions: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia*, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei Darussalam, Cameroon, Canada*, Cyprus, Eswatini, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, New Zealand*, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, South Africa, Sri Lanka, St Lucia, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom*, Vanuatu, Zambia

Application Process

  • To apply applicants will need to complete and submit an online application form using the online application system from the Apply Now Link.
  • A link to the form is available on the Commonwealth Foundation grants page. Before submitting your application form, please read the following annexes available on our website:
    • Annex 1 – List of eligible Commonwealth Foundation member countries3
    • Annex 2 – Preliminary application form questions
    • Annex 3 – Beginning with the end in mind: the value of results chains and logic models
    • Annex 4 – Logic model template
  • These documents will also be available in the application form under the page “resources”.
  • Please note that an organisation can only submit one application per grants call. The Commonwealth Foundation will only accept applications that have been submitted using the online application system.

Application Deadline: January 7, 2019

Application ClosedOfficial link

For Further Queries

You can forward any enquiries you have about our grants call to [email protected]
Disclaimer: Youth Opportunities spreads opportunities for your convenience and ease based on available information, and thus, does not take any responsibility of unintended alternative or inaccurate information. As this is not the official page, we recommend you to visit the official website of opportunity provider for complete information. For organizations, this opportunity is shared with sole purpose of promoting “Access to Information” for all and should not be associated with any other purposes.

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