New GFCF grants to India, South Africa, Poland and more…

SCAT’s Appreciative Inquiry process

2017 was a busy year for GFCF partners, who around the world are working to #ShiftThePower. Over the course of the year, the GFCF made a number of small grants under three main programmes, including: 19 grants to support individual organizations’ institutional development; 12 Burning Issuesgrants; and eight grants exploring European community philanthropy’s response to refugees and asylum seekers. New grants include:

• Support of $14,000 to Poland’s new FemFund, which was set up in 2017 to provide accessible and flexible funding for women’s rights organizations and grassroots feminist groups across the country. This GFCF institutional development grant will allow them to explore strategies around local resource mobilization, and will also cover other necessary start-up activities.

• An institutional development grant in the amount of $20,000 to South Africa’s Social Change Assistance Trust, to initiate their work with rural partners in establishing Youth Development Funds. This work is emerging from the Appreciative Inquiry process the organization undertook earlier in the year, also with funding from the GFCF.

• Institutional development support of $15,000 to Gramin Evam Nagar Vikas Parishad (GENVP) in India, to assist their work in developing community philanthropy amongst Dalit Communities in the Bihar state. This is the second time the GFCF will be working with GENVP.

• $14,700 to the Stara Zagora Community Foundation in Bulgaria, as part of the GFCF’s programme on refugees and asylum seekers. The goal of this grant is to shift negative local public sentiment around refugees, and to position the foundation as a mediator amongst relevant local stakeholders (government, civil society, etc.), who are working with a long-term view around migration.