Deadline: 20 May 2019

The Robert Bosch Stiftung (RBSG) and the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation of The German Marshall Fund of the United States (BST) are seeking applications for its 2019-2020 Confidence Building program to support confidence building activities of non-state actors in the South Caucasus, Ukraine, and Moldova, and its neighboring countries.

The partners are convinced that civil society can make a valuable contribution to the process of confidence building, mutual understanding, and reconciliation between populations in territories presently or recently involved in (armed) conflicts. This initiative is designed to encourage grantees to investigate new ways, methods, and approaches for fostering mutual understanding.

The projects should be initiated by civil society organizations which can effectively engage target audiences within the population of the region in their projects’ activities. Organizations requesting grants must be legally registered in one of the following countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine. The involvement of additional partners (especially those from the EU) is possible and welcome.

Grant Information

The average grant will be around 23,000 USD (about 18,000 EUR). Multilateral projects may exceed that amount in exceptional cases.

Focus Areas

Projects working in the following areas would be especially appreciated:

• Approaches to build and/or strengthen local, regional and national capacities to promote coexistence and reintegration.
• Cross-border initiatives for youth.
• Approaches to civic education or active citizenship.
• Approaches to reconciliation and peace that incorporate experiences from history and convey them to the younger generation.
• Arts and cultural work to advance peace and reconciliation.
• The role of media in overcoming stereotypes.

A special emphasis is placed on multilateral initiatives and those that reach out to the neighboring countries.

Projects should be exemplary, make use of novel and innovative means of building trust, and have a realistic and economical budget calculation.

BST and RBSG encourage applicants to be creative and bold. Project ideas can focus on creating various platforms (environment, music, sports, etc.) that bring together people from territories involved in conflicts, on facilitating contacts between state actors in the South Caucasus and the surrounding regions in non-formal settings, on using different media tools (traditional and/ or new) to foster mutual understanding, etc.

How to Apply

Project proposals must be submitted in English only, using the application and budget forms available on the given website.

For more information, please visit http://www.gmfus.org/initiatives/confidence-building-2019-2020-call-applications