Description
The Czech Community Foundations have identified two issues and challenges that we want to address with the project. The first is the growing pressure against civic initiatives and active citizen participation in public affairs by the holders of formal political, but also informal economic and social power. The second is the low capacity for effective communication between the different types of actors shaping the space for civil society. Community foundations are entities more or less independent from local actors. They do not represent any particular interest. Therefore, we want to a) highlight and use their important mediating role in communities and b) directly oppose efforts to exclude civic activities and activist-type NGOs from "polite society", to give them a pejorative label in society. The project will strengthen the capacity of 5 Czech community foundations. They will acquire new roles, an activation role and a community leadership role, and this will increase their capacity to respond to current societal issues. At the same time, the community foundations will be prepared to respond quickly and in a coordinated manner when needed. The primary beneficiaries of the project will be the staff and board members of the 6 member foundations. They will be directly involved in the implementation of most of the activities, be it planning activities at the locations of operation or training and peer learning at the republican level. Other beneficiaries will be civic sector leaders in the 5 regions. The applicant organisation is a partnership association of five local and regional foundations. Each of these entities will be actively involved in the implementation of the activities and objectives of the project. In each of the 5 regions of operation of the member entities, part of the planned project activities will be directly implemented and their local knowledge and expert insight is therefore essential for the implementation of the project activities.
Summary of project results
Through the implementation of the project, 5 Czech community foundations acquired new skills in the field of activation and leadership in communities, and at the same time, it was possible to establish cooperation mechanisms of civil sector leaders in the given regions. Thanks to this knowledge, skills and built-in mechanisms (activation groups or platforms created somewhere in general and somewhere ad hoc for situations that have arisen), it was possible to demonstrate the ability to respond quickly and together (in agreement) to current events and situations that have arisen in the regions. This was demonstrated in particular in three unexpected crisis situations - during the tornado in South Moravia, in Stebno in Lunsk, and at the end of the project when managing the refugee crisis and the connection with the war in Ukraine. In most of these cases, civil sector actors in the individual regions involved actively used the infrastructure and mechanisms built within the project to manage crisis situations. At the same time, it can be assumed, either from the existing practice of the aforementioned platforms and groups, or even from formalized declarations and cooperation agreements, that the cooperation and rapid response mechanisms created in the regions will continue to function after the end of the project.An unmissable effect of the project is also the increased awareness of community foundations among the public, which gradually manifests itself in gaining greater public favor, either by increasing the number of local donors, volunteers or other forms of support. This was fully manifested in the crisis situations described, in which community foundations actively entered in partnership with local actors. And last but not least, the professional and organizational capacity of the Association of Community Foundations was made visible at the national level, especially thanks to the two successfully held conferences with international participation and thanks to the elaborated and distributed collection of case studies among a wide range of professional members of the public.