Updates

Alliance for Gender Equality in Europe

The Alliance for Gender Equality in Europe is pleased to announce that it has just selected 26 small and medium-size frontline organisations in 16 countries across the European Union and the United Kingdom to receive 3.470.000€ in two-year grants as awardees of our 2023 economic opportunities fund. It aims at driving impactful and sustainable community-driven solutions that promote economic opportunities mainly for marginalised women, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people living in Europe. Since July 2023, the Alliance has been providing those organisations with grants up to 150 000€ and opportunities for networking, peer-learning and organisational development. If you are curious to know more about the results of this call and our new grantees, you might be interested in this article.

Stay tuned on the Alliance website and LinkedIn!

Civitates

To mark its five-year anniversary, Civitates has been undergoing a strategic refresh to hone its focus and inform its next chapter. It is expected that the new strategy, including priorities for its three portfolios (civic power, tech and democracy, media) will be finalised and widely disseminated by the end of the year. The refreshed strategy will inform a new grant-making phase in 2024 across all three portfolios, based on the renewed commitments of donor partners. New roles are being created to ensure that the Civitates team delivers on our ambitious plans.

EPIM

EPIM, in cooperation with regional CSOs AMIGA and Mareena, co-hosted a Ukraine Response CEE Convening in Prague on June 21-22. The two days provided space for 40+ civil society, government, philanthropic, private sector actors and migrant-led organisations from across the region to address issues of integration and inclusion of newly arrived migrants and refugees, building on the lessons learnt from the response to the displacement from Ukraine. Throughout the convening, participants were able to bridge their experiences with new ideas to build new streams of cooperation. The programme involved thematic break-out groups, workshops, panel discussions and casual networking evenings, allowing participants to collectively brainstorm and co-create solutions. 

European AI & Society Fund

The European AI & Society Fund recently published a new landscape review ‘Who’s Funding AI & Society Work in Europe?’. It aims to understand how to engage more philanthropic organisations in supporting the growing field. The findings reveal that more organisations are getting involved, offering a greater capability to fight for the public interest at this critical time of technological change. Philanthropic funding allows organisations to engage in policy and advocacy work with the freedom to pursue their missions independent of corporate interests. Recent policy wins of European non-governmental organisations in shaping AI legislation, such as the European Parliament voting to ban remote facial recognition, attest to it. However, this work needs money to sustain it. We have seen that the field remains under-resourced given the scale of the challenges it aims to address and there is far greater appetite in civil society to take on this work than we are able to meet. If would like to discuss this work, please contact Fund’s Director Catherine Miller.

JAFOWA

JAFOWA completed its second cycle this year. The period was devoted to evaluation, analysis and preparation of a new call for proposals. An initial call for proposals was launched in June, targeting partner farmers' organisations from the previous cycle with a view to strengthening the projects since the agroecological transition requires time and long-term support.

This new cycle aims to consolidate the agroecological transition strategy of the farmers' organisations. It focuses mainly on the dissemination of agroecological practices, economic sustainability and the marketing of agroecological products. JAFOWA is preparing another call for proposals for the end of the year. It will be open to new partners and will take into account the evolution of JAFOWA's strategy, which will be reviewed at a workshop with the foundations, partners and experts in December.

Healthy Food Healthy Planet

In July, HFHP organised the first meeting of the new ‘Kitchen Table’, which replaces a more traditional funder steering committee with one comprising equal numbers of foundations and CSOs (3 each). The Kitchen Table sets the strategic direction of HFHP and takes the ultimate decisions on funding, and is part of HFHP’s move towards more participatory grant-making. HFHP has also decided to no longer issue calls for proposals, but to support the co-creation of project proposals instead. The first CSO project co-creation convening will take place in Geneva in mid-September and aims to produce actionable campaigns to transform supermarkets’ buying and marketing practices. The proposals will then be finetuned with further support from HFHP and ultimately funded by HFHP and/or aligned and partner foundations.