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The Foundation is launching Common Cause, a large-scale grant competition with a 100 million ruble budget to support non-profits and cultural institutions. Our goal is to help the most vulnerable groups in the cultural field and non-profit sector with getting through the period of instability caused by the pandemic spread, effectively adopting new formats for their work, and giving their staff new skills necessary for their institutions’ further development.
There are two nominations, Museum. Culture. The New Form. and NGOs: Going Agile. The competition is open for cultural institutions (except for federally managed) and non-governmental non-profit organizations. The Foundation will be accepting and selecting applications on a monthly basis, from March through September 2020. Grants are awarded for a period of up to 12 months in the amount of up to 1 million rubles for each grantee.
Competition winners will be able to use the money to pay salaries to their staff and consultants, train their teams in using online work formats, create digital and remote access products, purchase equipment, and organize online events. This will enable social NGOs and cultural institutions to avoid downsizing their activities and continue their work on a full scale.
Oksana Oracheva, General Director of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation, comments: “One of our key tasks is to prevent the situation we are facing from having a negative impact on these organizations. We decided to launch a major grant competition to support cultural organizations and non-profits and enable them to quickly adapt to the new reality. Partial transition to distant formats may potentially become not only a short-term tool for overcoming the crisis but, in a long run, a platform for attracting new audiences and expanding operations.”
Common Cause grant competition has two media partners, Takie Dela and Agency for Social Information.
“It is extremely valuable that the foundation acted proactively, rather than waiting for any of the potential scenarios to unfold or referring back to all kinds of forecasts. The foundation felt the need at responded to it quickly and in a commensurate fashion: many NGOs are now confused, they are looking for ways to restructure their fundraising, to retain their regular and irregular donors, so that they don’t have to lay off staff, reduce their services or cut their awareness-raising and educational programs. The foundation lent its helping hand just in time and showed that it was prepared to support the sector in the situation when everyone is scared by uncertainty. The foundation’s competitions may make the imminent crisis a source of not only losses but also of new opportunities,” comments Elena Topoleva, Director of the Agency for Social Information.
“Charities were some of the first to fall victim to the crisis. Just on our website, we see that 20,000 donations did not go through in March because of insufficient balance on people’s debit cards. In addition to that, by end of March we saw a significant decrease in daily revenues. Foundations across the country are facing the same situation. They are closing down their programs, lay off their staff, decrease the amounts of charitable assistance. And this is happening at the moment when every day there are more and more people in Russia whose livelihood depends on help provided by charities. This is why the Vladimir Potanin Foundation’s initiative seems so timely and the right thing to do. This is why I support it wholeheartedly. I believe it can really support the sector that helps millions of people across the country, that helps those who have given up any hope to find support anywhere,” says Dmitry Aleshkovsky, Co-Founder of the Help Needed Charitable Foundation.
PRINCIPLES AND GUIDELINES FOR AWARDING “COMMON CAUSE” GRANTS
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