The community foundation East Flanders supports various bottom up projects of social importance. We note that the majority of the projects applying for project support are driven by organisations and/or highly educated middle class citizens.
We would like to explore to what extent we as a community foundation can also support projects that are designed and driven by people from an intended target group. We think of projects driven by young people in challenging conditions, who are themselves taking initiatives to strengthen the resilience of themselves and their peers.
Background
East Flanders is one of the 10 Belgian provinces with approximately 1.5 million inhabitants. It has Ghent as its provincial capital.
Recently, a community foundation was established for East Flanders. A community foundation brings people and resources together to support local projects. To raise funds, we mainly call on companies and individual donors. So it is about 'local philanthropy'. The scope of a community foundation goes beyond the financial support: we create a network of multiple stakeholders on a regional level: companies, project holders, sympathisers, municipalities etc. Various target groups and stakeholders come into contact with each other through the community foundation, which often leads to interesting collaborations resulting in new projects of social importance. Local fundraising also goes hand in hand with raising awareness and building support for the initiatives among the general public.
The ambition is to stimulate and support local projects in the entire province around the theme of “people and environment” (inclusion/welfare of vulnerable groups, social cohesion, biodiversity, sustainability, etc.).
The East Flanders Community Foundation is organised into five regions. One of these regions is Ghent, where we annually support 10 to 20 specific projects that strengthen the resilience of young people. Every year the community foundation organizes a call for projects. Citizens, actual associations and non-profit organisations can submit their project. We work with a matching fund principle: selected projects first do their own crowdfunding, under the guidance of the community foundation. Afterwards, the collected amount is doubled by the community foundation (up to a maximum of 5,000 euros). The doubling is made possible by our major donors, companies that participate as partners. The size of the financial support for a project is in the order of 10,000 euros.
Cfr. https://streekfondsoostvlaanderen.be/projecten/
Research question
The calls for projects often attract organisations or (highly) educated individuals, who are very motivated to improve the quality of life or future opportunities of certain target groups through their project. As community foundation, we find it very important to support such projects. We focus on organisations that do not receive structural subsidies: smaller or starting initiatives or projects that fall through the cracks and cannot be subsidised for a specific reason.
Many projects start from a specific question from a target group and take shape via a co-creative process in which the target group itself is involved. We try to focus on projects that involve target groups actively in the project process. Nevertheless, we note that the majority of the projects applying for project support are driven by organisations and/or highly educated middle class citizens.
We would like to explore to what extent we as a community foundation can also support projects that are designed and driven by people from an intended target group. We think of projects driven by young people in challenging conditions, who are themselves taking initiatives to strengthen the resilience of themselves and their peers.
We need to ask ourselves whether our current methodology, procedures and call criteria are adapted to this type of target groups and projects. And if not, we would like to investigate how we can adapt our procedures to also trigger projects driven by a target group:
- How can we trigger young people to set up initiatives/projects that improve their situation and the situation of their peers?
- How can we, as a community foundation, adapt our processes and criteria to these projects/project submitters?