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Grants and Grant Guidelines

Best Practice Programmes

Capacity Building

Balkan Youth Partnership Program

Grant Guidelines for Project Submission to the Balkan Children and Youth Foundation (BCYF)

Instructions
Background Information
Objective & Principles
Project Criteria
Additional Criteria
Eligibility of Applicants
Eligibility of Projects
Amounts available for financial support by BCYF
Evaluation of Project Descriptions

Grants

Instructions

• BCYF employs the model of so-called solicited grant making with the emphasis put on the proactive approach by the appointed local consultants. In simple words this means that an NGO interested in receiving funding cannot just send a project proposal to the BCYF office or to the local consultant. If an NGO is interested in getting BCYF's support, it should contact the local consultant for the respective country and present information on its activity in general and the activity it considers eligible for funding. The local consultants run an ongoing process of identifying children and youth programs, so they take note of all the information presented. It is up to the local consultants to decide which programs could be interesting for BCYF and for this purpose they can also approach NGOs and request information about their work. Once the local consultants have decided which programs to recommend to BCYF Office, they contact the NGOs and offer them to fill out an application form i.e. to prepare a project description in the appropriate format. After the NGO has delivered the project description to the local consultant, the consultant has the choice to a) recommend it to BCYF office, b) return it to the NGO if he/she feels that the project description does not meet BCYF standards. After the project descriptions are delivered to the BCYF office, they are further processed and the final decision is made by the BCYF Board.
• The project descriptions should be submitted to the appointed local consultants within deadlines set by consultants themselves. First, the local consultant performs a preliminary screening of the project descriptions and verifies whether they are eligible for submission to BCYF and second, performs and evaluation of the merit of the proposed project.

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Background information

Founded in 2000, the Balkan Children and Youth Foundation (BCYF), is a unique initiative aimed at improving the conditions and prospects for young people throughout the region. With regional operations headquartered in Skopje, Macedonia, BCYF's goal is to serve as a catalyst in strengthening the youth development sector in the region, through a range of capacity building supports, targeted grant-making and networking opportunities.

BCYF represents a new model of regional cooperation that aims to increase the effectiveness, scale and sustainability of existing youth programmes and educational approaches within the region. Its goal is to build positive, long-term supports for the region's young people through strengthening and expanding country-specific initiatives and scaling them up on a regional level.

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Objectives and Principles

Best Practices

BCYF favours holistic approaches in the area of youth programming. It is looking for programmes that foster the overall development of young people and not exclusively in one developmental field only, e.g. physical development only. In addition, the proposed project descriptions should represent and comply with the concept of being best practices, meaning that BCYF is not supporting "new initiatives" but rather adds to the ones that are ongoing and effective, that have already shown a positive development on youth and a significant impact on them. BCYF will develop its programmes on the basis of best practices for youth development already in place in the region. A next step would be to screen existing programmes based on criteria for effectiveness, adapted to local reality in order to channel investments to the most effective programmes and organizations.

Youth Participation and Positive Long-Term Youth Development

Preference will be given to those programmes that favour the active participation of young people in programme decisions, design, and implementation. With the support of adults, young people should be given the tools and provided with the conditions to design their own world, and conceive their future.

Intercultural Learning

Young people are the building blocks for a peaceful and prosperous Balkan region. In order to help them overcome the many obstacles to inter-community and inter-regional cooperation, there would be a heavy emphasis on intercultural learning, cross-border exchanges, conflict-resolution workshops, and the promotion of cultural tolerance. In this context, the extraordinary need and appetite for foreign language study, and the extraordinary ways in which cultural and sport exchanges contribute to overcoming differences, must be noted.
The status of Roma children is precarious, the general level of education - and therefore the life chances - of Roma children is very low, and they are often exposed to crime. The case has been made for Roma youth to be included as a special case, given their stateless, dire situation, but not exclusively as a target group. In general, the situation of minorities needs to be considered and regional approaches within countries should be given important considerations, on a case-by-case basis.

These principles should be guiding principles and could not be imposed on any group operating in the region. Local conditions would dictate whether or not it is opportune to encourage cross-border and cross-community exchanges.

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Project Criteria

The following list of criteria should serve as a set of general, but flexible guidelines for the planning and implementation of projects and also for their evaluation. The emphasis will depend on the respective thematic field as well as the nature of the projects (projects, naturally, do not have to fulfil every single criteria). The framework is based on the overall aims of the Balkan Children and Youth Foundation and the Recommendations of the BCYF's Board of Directors.

In order to build a strategic plan for this Initiative, BCYF needs to support programmes and initiatives that incorporate or further develop and strengthen the following criteria:

1. Employment

• Programmes preparing young people for wage and self-employment constitute a programme priority.
• School and community based programmes that provide young people with the personal, social and technical skills to successfully participate in the economy.
• Programmes promoting and inculcating values of ethical business practices and economic citizenship among young people.

2. Technology

Several countries in the region are lagging behind other countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the introduction and wide usage of new technologies. As a result, a large percentage of young people in the Balkans are not familiar with computer and digital technologies.

• Programmes introducing information and communication technologies in the classrooms and in programmes serving young people.

3. Non-formal education

• Programmes supporting efforts to foster greater civic education, reinforcing multi-cultural learning and extending learning opportunities to out-of-school youth.
  

1. Fostering civic education,
2. Focusing on the needs of the individual,
3. Incorporating culture and context in the curriculum,
4. Reaching young people who are out of school, and
5. Building on peer education.

4. Health Promotion and Prevention

• Programmes helping adolescents address their special health needs as they learn new social and sexual roles
• Life-skills programmes aimed at preventing risks of HIV/STD and drug abuse among young people in the region.
  
• Prevention of prostitution.
  

5. Civic Education and Democracy Building

• Programmes focusing on civic education, human rights education and democracy building.
  
• Supporting efforts to engage young people in positive development trends towards building their democratic communities, nations and the region as a whole.

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Additional Criteria

1. Holistic & Best Practice Criteria

2. Organizational Context

3. Impact on the system and the processes of reform:
relevance of the activities,

• relevance of the activities;
• dissemination of the project experience (esp. possibilities to iincorporate results into the formal system),
• possible follow-up measures.

4. Impact on civil society:

• promotion of democratic processes in and through projects (e.g. participatory management),
• inclusion strategies for underrepresented/excluded groups (minorities, disadvantaged, gender issues, rural areas, etc.),
  
• furthering good neighbourliness, inter-/cross-cultural advantages.

5. Technical and financial quality of the project:

• clear description of the objectives of the project and their relevance to the needs and context,
  
• duration of projects/programmes, steps and mechanism of implementation,
  
• clear management structure,
  
• iindicators of progress and evaluation,
  
• financial, administrative and technical capacities of the applicant's team,
  
• funding obtained (other funding sources) /requested, adequate transparency and accountability in the allocation and the use of funds.

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Eligibility of Applicants

Registered, local non-governmental organizations whose work/projects focus primarily on positive children and youth long-term development, from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro (comprising) Kosovo are eligible to apply for grants.

Applicants should: have experience in managing youth projects, have at least one staff member who speaks English, own or have access to necessary office equipment such as telephone, computer, fax, modem, etc., and be able to prove their interest in and ability to communicate and network with similar organizations from other countries. Applicants shall be non-political.

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Eligibility of Projects

Prior to evaluating the quality of the particular program, the BCYF local consultant runs a check of each received program description against this list of eligibility criteria. The program description that does not meet all 10 criteria is considered ineligible for further evaluation.

1. The program description follows the BCYF Application Form.
2. The application met the deadline for submission.
3. The application is typewritten, composed in English language, and received in an electronic format.
4. The budget is in USD.
5. The grant requested is not less then 3.000 USD and not more then 25.000USD.
6. The duration of the project is not longer then 1 year.
7. The financial support is not requested for a one-off conference, constitutional meeting, exclusively for seed funding, for individual sponsorships or individual scholarships.
8. The applicant is a registered non-governmental entity.
9. The applicant is from one of the following countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro (comprising Kosovo), Macedonia, Moldova, Romania.
10. The applicant is non-political.

Activities: Only activities that comply with the Project Criteria are eligible for funding. Ineligible types of activities are one-off conferences, constitutional meetings, seed funding, individual sponsorships or individual scholarships.

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Amounts available for financial support by BCYF

In 200 3 grants awarded by BCYF will be comprised between USD 3'000 and 25'000. Attention will be paid to the balance between the amounts of the grants requested and the annual budgets of NGOs wh ich are applying.

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Evaluation of Project Descriptions

The Local Consultants from the respective countries perform a preliminary screening of Project Descriptions and verify whether these are eligible for submission to BCYF. Applicants will be informed on the results through their Local Consultant.

The BCYF Programme Officer, in consultation with the respective Local Consultant, will review all project proposals and short list projects, which meet BCYF's criteria. Projects that do not meet the criteria will be listed for the BCYF's Board Members. A copy of the proposal will be filed with BCYF and will be available for review.

The BCYF's Board of Directors - with both international and regional representation - makes the final decision on awarding grants.

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