Open Door Grant Making
Eurasia Partnership Foundation recognizes that smart people with good ideas can have significant social impact, especially working at the grassroots level. Social entrepreneurs bring fresh solutions and ideas to existing challenges and are the driving forces behind many of the most successful interventions. The Foundation’s Open Door Grant Mechanism is a tool to support innovative and sometimes risky pilot projects and to test new ideas on a small scale. When projects supported through the Open Door Grant Program demonstrate success, the Foundation can help to replicate them at a larger scale or in different locations.
EPF programs can be grouped into five broad, strategic program areas: Citizen Engagement; Economic Development; Building Research Capacity, Enabling Philanthropy, and Cross Border cooperation. Our strategy of Citizen Engagement includes a wide range of programs adapted to the demand and opportunity in each country, from our Youth Fund Program, which empowers youth leaders to fund community projects that create a public good to our ENP Civic Participation and Monitoring Projects, which review and recommend new governmental policies being adopted to comply with the European Neighborhood Programme.
Economic Development can help build a vibrant middle class that becomes publicly engaged. EPF is supporting a limited number of economic development programs where a specific niche arises. In Georgia, the focus has been the tourism sector because statistical studies have shown that for each development dollar invested the returns in job creation have been quite significant.
Research Capacity allows us and our local researchers to better understand the political, social and economic developments. It helps inform our decisions as well as the decisions of local and international businesses, the international community, governments and the growing policy community. EPF’s Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) have become known as the most objective and reliable resource for training researchers, collecting data and providing trend analysis of the constantly changing needs, demands and opportunities in the South Caucasus.
EPF’s Cross-Border Programs support multi-country projects/programs implemented by partnerships of organizations from the two or the three countries of the South Caucasus and/or a wider region. Please find the Review and Quarterly Deadlines here..
Finally, we believe that to maintain longer term support for citizen engagement, targeted economic development and high-quality, objective policy-oriented research, EPF must support the development of Philanthropy in the Caucasus. We are currently supporting a Corporate Social Investment program and advocating for new legislation on endowments and individual giving.
Certain program activities cannot be supported by EPF:
• support for a particular political party (yet, work that includes all parties on issues like electoral processes, may be possible if it is open access, fair, unbiased and objective)
• Lobbying for partisan purposes (EPF may advocate for issues, which bring about public and social good – like better endowment laws)
• Religious activities (EPF may support a religious organization for non-religious aims if they correspond to our mission)
• Capital construction projects for commercial purposes
• Military projects of any kind
It should also be noted that at EPF cannot provide funding for:Micro-credit, small business loans, start-up capital for entrepreneurs, Non-applied academic research, Proprietary market research, Scholarships or travel grants for academic study and Medical equipment purchases.
2010 Small Grants Competition to Empower Citizens through Participatory Civic Monitoring and Advocacy
The winners of the 2010 competition for small grants
Grant Competition: Open Door
The winners of the grant 2010 Grant Competition
