In recent years, there has been a lot of talk all over the world about grants and grant-eaters. Few people know what grants are, and everyone intuitively hates grant-eaters, but who they are is also not completely clear. Here's everything you need to know about grants.
What is a grant?
… A grant is a social investment. And if an investor expects to receive a monetary income from an ordinary cash investment, then in the case of a social investment the investor expects to receive a social income, that is, some kind of qualitative social change. This is in the long term, but in the short term, say, qualified personnel are ready to work to achieve this change or a favorable legislative field. Imagine that you want Ukraine to finally have no orphanages and are ready to spend certain funds on this. You cannot expect that orphanages will disappear tomorrow, no matter how much money you invest, because any social change takes a lot of time and great effort. But you can, for example, invest in the education of social educators and public service announcements that encourage people to start family-type orphanages. And the more money you invest and the better the managers of the funds you have invested, the more chances we have of getting a quality social change in a few years.
Who are the grants given to?
It makes sense that you want your money to be managed by professionals in the sector in which you would like to change something. Environmentalists and scientists, if the problem you want to solve concerns the environment, teachers and social workers, if we are talking about the same orphanages, or experienced media workers, if you want to improve the level of journalism in the country. In each sector there are public organizations, the purpose of which is to introduce qualitative social changes in their sector. It is to them that you give the money.
Just take and give?
Not. There are many public organizations, but the amount of money is still limited. Therefore, as a rule, such assistance is provided to the winners of grant competitions for non-profit organizations. That is, you announce a competition for the disposal of a certain amount of money. In the conditions of the competition, you describe your priorities, describe the ideal manager (that is, what a public organization should look like, which you could entrust the implementation of your goals - experience in the sector, the amount of money with which the organization disposed in the past, the types of projects that the organization was able to successfully complete, etc.) and determine the deadline for project completion and the deadline for submission of applications. And most importantly, you create a questionnaire for interested non-profit organizations to fill out.
Public organizations, in turn, monitor grant competitions and fill out questionnaires if your priorities correspond to the goals of their organizations. In the questionnaire, they usually offer you specific projects, that is, ways to solve your social problem and develop a budget. The budget clearly indicates how much money they need to implement their plans and what exactly they will go to.)
And then you, that is, the grantor, choose one or more of the best projects and invest in them in accordance with the indicated budgets.
An agreement is concluded between the donor and the organization, according to which the sponsor provides money or resources to the recipient, subject to the fulfillment of certain requirements stipulated in this agreement. Like any agreement, the grant agreement can be terminated and then the manager of the grant funds will be forced to return the money. Actually, as in the case if it fulfills, say, not all the conditions specified in the contract.
What amounts are we talking about?
About different. From several hundred rubles to several hundred thousand dollars, and in some cases even millions.
Where does the grant money come from? And who is distributing them?
You can also become a donor, even a few hundred rubles is enough. But let's start in order.
Grant money has several sources of income:
Crowdfunding is a joint fundraising by the community for some kind of social initiative, project or charity. Usually, such fundraising takes place on special crowdfunding platforms, which have their own forms to fill out, terms and conditions.
It works as follows. People, groups of people or public organizations that have an idea for a social project fill out an application form on the platform's website, determine the amount they need to collect and the number of days that the campaign will last, then the application is moderated by the platform administrators, if necessary, it is returned for revision and only then is it published on the site.
All projects for which there is an active fundraising can be seen on the main page. For each project, you can see how many days are left until the end of the campaign, and how much money has already been raised. The platform keeps 10% of the amount for itself if the amount is collected in full and on time, and 15% - if the project has collected half or more of the planned amount by the end of the campaign. If the project team failed to collect even half, the money is returned to the benefactors. These or similar rules apply to almost all crowdfunding platforms.
Other well-known crowdfunding platforms include GoFundMe (www.gofundme.com). The platform was founded in 2010 and during its existence, like Kickstarter, has raised more than $ 3 billion. In the case of this platform, it is mainly for social projects and charity. And although, as you can see, Ukrainians are not yet ready to invest in social investments, so much has begun to move in our country. Last year, Spilnokosht even opened institutional crowdfunding, where socially important organizations and businesses can try to raise money not for a project, but for their own development. And here we are already talking not about tens, but about hundreds of thousands of hryvnias. Crowdfunding, by the way, is the very type of grant funds, where your few hryvnias can even help a lot.
Donor grants - funds transferred by the governments of developed countries and / or patrons to special funds (they are also donor organizations), which in turn distribute them in accordance with their own priorities and / or the priorities of the customer for solving acute social problems in their own or less developed countries … Quite simply, it looks like this: there is a large developed state or a very rich person whose budget allows you to allocate a certain amount of money for the development of democracy or solving social problems in less developed countries. or non-governmental (non-governmental) organizations or foundations (more often the latter, hence the well-known abbreviation NGO - non-governmental organization). It is these large organizations that develop priorities and plans for solving certain problems in certain countries.
And since it is difficult enough to solve pressing problems in another part of the world, these organizers become donors to smaller organizations on the ground that are engaged in the development of a particular sector in the countries that the fund intends to help. That is, to the same public organizations that we talked about above. To select the best counterparties, international foundations organize grant competitions and hire local experts, and some even open their own offices in priority countries. Often, the counterparties of international funds become the directions of the governments of the countries that are developing, that is, state employees become the managers of funds. Unfortunately, this is where the problems most often begin, but more on that later. For example, here you can find a list of the largest international donors working in Ukraine and brief information on their priorities.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a fairly new type of grant aid; it is helping businesses to public initiatives and organizations that are among the company's priorities. Often the companies themselves close the issue of corporate social responsibility simply - they transfer funds to charity or buy New Year's gifts for children from orphanages. However, this area is actively developing and companies are increasingly ready to support social projects that correspond to their priorities. For example, last year Shell supported a series of articles about Ukrainian scientists on the Platfor.ma website. The special project was called "Scientific Approach" and opened many new names. Another way that companies willingly help is with their own resources. They can, for example, send a team of employees to rebuild a historical wall of a historic castle. Thus, a good deed will be combined with team building.
And in order to receive a grant, is it necessary to have a public organization?
Depends on your goal. First, there are individual grants - their foundations or patrons give individuals (that is, ordinary people, without organizations and enterprises) for training abroad, research or creative activity, production of any product (for example, journalists are often given individual grants for training specific investigation or a series of publications on the topic of others). Such grants are most often issued through open competitions, which are not much different from grant competitions for organizations.
Secondly, there are donors who agree to work with commercial organizations, but there are few such donors. Therefore, even in the case of funding social business projects, donors often ask grantees to create their own public non-profit organizations, thus somewhat protecting themselves from improper use of funds. After all, all the money that falls into the accounts of commercial companies is automatically considered income, that is, according to the law, it should lead to enrichment, and this is very undesirable for working with grants. In addition, additional taxes are charged on the fees of commercial organizations, which increases the cost of administering a grant for donors. …
