Rising-Voices-Microgrant-Competition

Application Deadline: March 1 2013

Do you have an idea for a project that would help your local community use citizen media to tell their own story? Do you need funding and support in making that idea become a reality?

Rising Voices is pleased to announce the launch of the 2013 Microgrants for Citizen Media Outreach Projects.

Since 2007, Rising Voices has sought to support individuals, grassroots groups, networks, and organizations committed to helping their local communities participate more fully in the digital online space. By providing funding and mentoring to small-scale projects around the world, Rising Voices has supported 35 citizen media outreach projects located in all corners of the globe.

These projects have helped local leaders bring new and underrepresented voices into the global digital conversation in order to tell their own stories or bring to light issues important to their own communities.

Beginning with the 2013 round of microgrant funding, Rising Voices has developed a new platform where applicants can publicly share their ideas with the broader community. This open process can enable greater opportunities to seek feedback and to help facilitate connections between groups located in the same geographic area or working around the same issue. We feel that this new way of sharing ideas will have a positive effect on the global community that shares the common goal of a more inclusive and diverse digital online space.

Once again, we will provide up to five microgrants in the amount of $USD 2,500-4,000 to successful applicants that have demonstrated a strong and clear idea how to best provide training and ongoing support to their local community members. Selected grantee projects will join the Rising Voices community of projects and be featured prominently across the Global Voices network.

GUIDELINES

Rising Voices seeks project proposals that share our mission of bringing voices from new communities, as well as underrepresented language groups to the online global conversation through the use of participatory citizen media. The project’s primary activities should be to provide citizen media training workshops to the target community, as well vital ongoing support and mentoring. Please see our roster of current and alumni grantee projects for examples of previously funded projects.

Examples of potential projects may include:

• Organizing a citizen media “boot camp” with experienced local bloggers to train and mentor participants from underrepresented communities that will result in a local network of support.
• Working with an indigenous community to teach and encourage new generations to begin to use Twitter to connect with others as a way to preserve and promote their native language online.
• Partnering with a local library with a computer lab to invite community members to discuss local problems and solutions, and train them how to create a group blog to take these conversations to the wider community.
• Organizing a series of digital photography group walks where residents can document life in their community together and create an online Flickr photography exhibit.
• Teaching local residents to record and edit audio recordings on Audacity for a community podcast that can be uploaded online, as well as distributed to local radio stations for a wider reach.

Project ideas are not limited to these, and we encourage you to be creative, yet realistic in your proposals. See the Frequently Asked Questions for additional information.

To apply, please visit the “Submit a Proposal” page, where you will find short questions that will enable you to outline your project plans. Please note that there is a character-limit for each answer (not word-limit).

APPLICATION PROCESS

The competition will follow the following timeline process:

First Round – Applicants submit their initial proposal via the online platform. Once the proposal has been published, we invite applicants to share their proposal with their networks, as a way to solicit comments and input from others. Please note that there is an option for applicants to keep their proposal private if there are security concerns.

All of the proposals will be reviewed by a committee comprised of members from the Global Voices community, including past microgrant recipients.

Application deadline is Friday, March 1, 2013 at 23:59 GMT

Second Round – The selection committee will choose a shortlist of finalists, who will then be invited to submit a longer and more detailed proposal including budget, timeline, and additional detailed information. These finalists will also have the option to submit additional multi-media, such as a user-created video or photographs to help the committee make a final decision.

Winners will be announced by March 31 (subject to change based on the number of proposals to be reviewed).