Fellowship Summary: The Fellowship project aims at providing charities with a new digital instrument for fundraising and donation analytics, including website/fundraising pages launch tool, and check-out charity extension for woo-commerce powered websites.
FANDY platform is a digital tool designed to help charities raise funds through donations and subscriptions, manage donors, and provide donation analytics. The platform includes a web builder for donation forms and fundraising pages, an admin dashboard, and management tools for donors (users donating money).
The platform’s user-friendly interface and range of features, such as the web builder and analytics dashboard, have contributed to its success. As more charities begin to use FANDY, its impact is set to grow, making it an essential tool for the fundraising community. Overall, FANDY has the potential to revolutionize the way charities raise funds and manage donations.
As a result of the Fellowship, charities in EaP countries got access to a modern-day fundraising service, which can help them raise more funds and make a greater impact in their respective fields. Additionally, this can help introduce new technologies and practices to the charity sector, which can help CSOs become more effective and efficient in their operations.
Fellowship Summary: The Fellowship project will identify, assess, and coach youth activists in disadvantaged communities in Causeni, Cahul, Ungheni of the Republic of Moldova.
Municipal councils that better serve interests of our communities are those that better fight ineffective governance and corruption locally. Therefore, the Fellowship project promotes stronger oversight role of municipal councils over the work of Mayors and their offices. The project will create incentive for local political parties to initiate oversight by supporting quality media coverage of identified local problems.
Fellowship Summary: Assisting Ukrainian young activists and youth CSOs with organization development and increasing resilience of their CSOs / initiatives by collecting and sharing best practices, tools and methods used by Ukrainian CSOs and initiatives and proven to be efficient in the current context.
In 2022, with the invasion of Ukraine, Rostyslav and his colleagues understood that they could play a positive part in serving their communities by using their new skills in organizing volunteerism and their professional expertise as educationalists. As such the ‘Inspiration Café’ was born and its first project was to establish an Educational Hub in Uzhhorod, in Zakarpatska oblast, which, with EU funding, was able to provide a safe, learning environment for more than 500 children displaced by the war. From the experience of being part of the Educational Hub and from facing the challenges of how to support and grow a community organization, Rostyslav realized how important it was for community initiatives, particularly those led by young activists, to access guidance and practical support for development of strategies and resource mobilization. This was the motivation for Rostyslav to design his ‘Enroot Resilience’ project, which became the focal point of his civil society fellowship.
Through ‘Enroot Resilience’ Rostyslav has produced and published a series of mini-training videos aimed at guiding Ukrainian grassroots organisations to take their first steps in community projects. The videos have had more than 15,000 views and have been complimented with networking activities facilitated by Rostyslav. The networking events were opportunities for activists to meet up and share experiences on developing projects and finding resources. Rostyslav reflected on the success of these activities:
“Learning by doing is probably the most effective way to build capacity for community projects, but learning from the practical experience of others is extremely important. I have learnt so much from listening to the testimonies of activists during our roundtable discussions”.
To conclude his fellowship project Rostyslav hosted a ‘Time for Resilience’ forum, with a mixture of more than 100 offline and online participants. The day-long event involved inputs of lots of different practitioners from civil society, including from other civil society fellows, such as Hanna Nishnindze who delivered a session on Fundraising, and was well-supported with participation from the management of the National Youth Council and local office for Erasmus+ coordination. The feedback from the forum has been excellent:
“Many of the young activists used it as a springboard for building new partnerships,” noted Rostyslav, “with others, since the forum, successfully taking on community leadership positions.”
Taking on board the lessons learned from the fellowship, the initial ‘inspiration café’ organization has now been transformed to a CSO called ‘Education 360’ and, with Rostyslav’s and his colleagues’ increased organizational capacities, the CSO has a clear strategy and annual plans. Rostyslav intends to continue to split his time between his formal school teaching duties and the activism managed through ‘Education 360’.
Watch a series of videos to help grassroots organisations to take their first steps in community projects (in Ukrainian only!):
1) The Art of Grant Writing: You will learn the key stages of writing a grant proposal and effective strategies to ensure a successful outcome.
2) Communications and Promotion for CSOs: You will learn how to increase the visibility of your organization through effective communication and promotion.
3) Forming partnerships: You will learn how to create strong partnerships to sustain and strengthen the organization.
4) Scaling: You will learn how to grow your community and distribute your products or services.
5) Project Planning: You will learn the important steps and strategies that will ensure the success of your project.
6) How to prevent emotional burnout?: You will learn how to take care of your emotional health and avoid emotional burnout.
7) How to successfully fundraise?: You will learn about the most effective methods of attracting financial resources for your organization.
Fellowship Summary: Advocating for better education for ethnic minority youth in Georgia, by identifying and addressing the issues that cause Azerbaijani and Armenian youth in Samtkhe-Javakheti and Kvemo Kartli regions to drop out/not complete higher education.
Fellowship Summary: Mentoring programme to connect young Ukrainians (mentees) with students from unvesities abroad (mentors) to help them with personal development. Mentors help Ukrainians to apply to universities, write personal statements and CVs, support moving abroad during the war, and overcome the language barrier.
Fellowship Summary: Research and recommendations on the development of practices for people with mental health problems living in group homes to be included in the community decision-making process.
In parallel with academic studies, with a MA in Social Work and a nearly completed Doctorate in Sociology, Gohar Khachatryan has charted her civic activism through a range of CSOs and Thinktanks in her native Armenia since 2016. She grew up in a provincial town and through voluntary work with a local CSO began to understand how vulnerable groups often have their rights ignored or abused. While pursuing her academic goals Gohar had the opportunity to study the dynamics of anti-discrimination. From 2018 to 2019 Gohar was a Research Fellow with the Public Policy Institute and under an EU-funded project ‘Pursuing Positive Change Through Empowering CSOs’ she analysed methods and toolkits for protecting against discrimination. Later, in 2022, Gohar spent time in Austria, supported by an Erasmus+ action, exploring mechanisms and practices for the prevention of gender-based violence and learning from challenges in the management of mental health services.
“When the call’ for applicants for the Civil Society Fellows came out in the second half of 2022, I saw a great opportunity for making a positive contribution to promote community-based approaches to mental healthcare in Armenia.”
Accordingly, Gohar set about to evaluate the policies and practices used in the establishment and operations of the first four innovative, post-Soviet ‘group homes’ in Armenia. These are residential homes for citizens who require support on specific mental health issues. The homes, in the regions of Ararat, Kotayk, Lori, and the capital Yerevan, were initially established though programmes of international organisations and now jointly run with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and cooperation with the local authorities. The long-term aim of the ‘homes’ is to support mental health sufferers to live independent lives in the community. As such, Gohar used her fellowship to look at the progress in a particular area – the extent to which the residents of the ‘group homes’ participate in local decision-making processes – and to facilitate a fully participatory research process involving the residents, the staff and management of the homes.
As a result of her fellowship, Gohar has helped to create a degree of momentum towards the goal of having ‘independent living’ as the guiding policy principle on mental healthcare provision. Having pioneered research on this subject, she has created a space for further research and investigation, and through debate on her research paper has ensured that the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs will endorse the paper’s recommendations. Furthermore, the Ministry for Territorial Infrastructure has agreed to disseminate the report to its local government communities in Armenia with the intention of inspiring them to take action to be more inclusive in their decision-making.
With regard to the rights-holders in these ‘group homes’ Gohar has also noted positive changes. Residents are now aware of their rights and the management of the homes have a better understanding of how they can improve the protection of those rights. For example, there had been a previous practice for the management of the ‘group homes’ to confiscate and safeguard the passports of residents. But, through the consultative activities of Gohar’s research, residents and staff were able to learn about the importance and usefulness for residents to keep their own passports and consequently three of the ‘group homes’ have changed their policy on this issue.
Gohar also reported that there were other bright moments generated by the interaction with the residents. During the fellowship project Gohar wanted to create some visual products (posters and flyers) to raise awareness and promote the findings of the research.
“To do this we had a designer to come up with some visual drafts and then we showed these to the residents to ask for their opinions and ideas on how to finalize the products. The posters and flyers were duly made and at the fellowships final event the residents of the ‘group homes’ saw these outputs and were so pleased to see their ideas and suggestions incorporated. This was really empowerment in action.”
Gohar will be continuing her mission to support the protection of the rights of women and men with mental health issues and more broadly engage in the defence of rights of other vulnerable groups. “Being part of civil society is paramount to this process as it means that I can investigate and advocate without the restraints that may otherwise come if I was a State employee”. As part of this mission, Gohar, with other like-minded colleagues, set up a platform called ‘Change’. Gohar hopes that this organisation will be an effective addition to the rights protection architecture in Armenia and is proud that its first advocacy action was to promote the findings from her fellowship project.
Fellowship Summary: Based on good practices from Georgia, build capacity in advocacy and policy analysis for a cohort of civil society activists and youth from marginalized communities in Ukraine to shift from single-issue activism towards coalition-building and transformative work.
Fellowship Summary: Research on citizens’ participation mechanisms in Shida Kartli region, and their promotion among the local residents, with the focus on active young leaders.
Fellowship Summary: A series of project management trainings for 80 young people from 4 regions “Youth in action” to increase their knowledge in the field of project management and public sector management.
