R E C G R A N T S
REC Call for NGOs
The Regional Environmental Center is pleased to announce the 1999 Call for Tender for Region-Wide Cooperative Environmental Grants for Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). Thanks to the generosity of the Matra Programme of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, EUR 150,000 will be available for NGO projects eligible under the Region-Wide Cooperative call's guidelines. The deadline for Concept Papers is September 15, 1999. The total amount available per project is up to EUR 25,000. The Call for Tender text and concept paper guidelines will be available direct from the REC's Local Offices and Head Office and the REC's website at <www.rec.org>, beginning July 1, 1999.
Cooperative projects over the past two years have addressed a range of topics. For example, in Latvia and Estonia, two NGOs are working together to promote NGO activities on Local Agenda 21. Albanian and Croatian NGOs are developing an environmental education and conservation program focused on the Mediterranean monk seal and its habitat. In Hungary and Poland, NGOs were able to conduct a high profile awareness-raising campaign on sustainable consumption patterns and genetically modified organisms. And a project in Slovakia and the Czech Republic is bringing NGOs together to protect large predators and their trans-boundary habitats.
These are but a few of the multi-country projects that the REC has supported. This year, NGOs should again reach out to partners in other countries to find common ground for an environmental project. Projects that benefit the environment of only one or primarily one country will not be considered. The grant is intended to support projects where two or more NGOs from different countries work together equally to address environmental issues common to their countries.
The application is a two-part process. In the first part, NGOs find partners and prepare a project outline. The most promising project outlines, or Concept Papers, are awarded a small start-up grant (up to EUR 600) to facilitate the actual meeting between partner NGOs. Project partners must use these funds to meet together to prepare the full project proposal. The text of the full proposal guidelines will be available from the REC's Local Offices and Head Office in September 1999.
(For further information, please contact the REC Grants Department: <grantinfo@rec.org> or Adriana Craciun <acraciun@rec.org>, Angelika Halasz <ahal-asz@rec.org>.)
