What’s New…
Open Solicitation
INSPIRES has an open call for applications in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria. The funding is intended to support local organizations who have ongoing concerns and interests with regards to activities that dovetail with Objective 1 of INSPIRES. This funding will support local partners and their networks who wish to take an important role in capturing, aggregating, contextualizing and sharing local information relating to civic space, as well as facilitating local reflection and planning around the findings that emerge from the machine learning model. Please find additional details here.
INSPIRES COVID-19 Response
INSPIRES is in the midst of launching a massive response to restrictions in civic space due to COVID-19. Thanks to USAID, INSPIRES now has an additional $2 million in rapid response funding. The team is already in discussions with several USAID missions and commencing activities in the following countries: Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, South Sudan, Bolivia, and Ecuador, with more to come.
Priority categories of activities where INSPIRES can consider support for civil society actors in closing civic space related to COVID-19 include, but are not limited to, the following: the legal enabling environment, the media and information space, financial viability, and strengthening civic ties. Illustrative examples of activities can be found below.
Legal Enabling Environment activities:
Monitoring the implementation, enforcement, and impact of emergency policies and procedures
Written analysis or comments on laws, amendments, and regulations
Capacity building to enhance local legal expertise and civil society advocacy
Assistance navigating new legal restrictions
Media, Information and Public Image:
Media and information ecosystem mapping
Strategic communications development
Sharing information that saves lives
Media and internet law and policy analysis and advocacy
Access to Resources:
Legal and regulatory frameworks to enable financial sustainability
Innovative avenues to maintain financial sustainability
Strengthening Civic Ties:
Alliance building and convening
Constituency strengthening
Partners’ COVID-19 Response
INSPIRES would like to highlight our consortium partners’ responses:
Internews set up the Information Saves Lives Rapid Response Fund to help small, local news organizations survive in the face of COVID-19. The Fund was seeded with $100,000 in unrestricted funding from Internews, to directly support media outlets, organizations and individuals reporting on COVID-19 for underserved communities around the world. With additional support from Luminate, Internews will support more than 100 grantees.
ICNL put out the COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker. A collaborative effort by ICNL, ECNL, and their global network of partners, the tracker monitors government responses to the pandemic that affect civic freedoms and human rights, focusing on emergency laws.
January-March 2020
The INSPIRES team traveled to Belgrade, Serbia the week of March 1-6, 2020 for the Resiliency+ Process Launch. The week included the Coaches Training, the Networking Event, and the Cohort Workshop.
The week began with the three-day coaches training of R+ international coaches and local facilitators. This event sought to foster a space for all participants to truly understand and begin to live the values embedded in the Resiliency+ Framework by bringing together the international coaches and local facilitators who were able to attend. Discussions focused on understanding how resiliency applies to civil society, what a resilient organization looks like, and which fundamental principles such as adaptive management and scenario planning will inform the resiliency-building process. Additionally, the training gave the coaches and facilitators key in-person time to share civic space challenges from each country and plan out initial steps for implementation. Finally, the training allowed the group to agree upon communications norms and practices to facilitate continued learning throughout the R+ implementation.
To expand the project’s reach in Serbia beyond the cohort of six organizations directly going through the Resiliency+ Process, the INSPIRES Consortium invited additional civil society actors to the public networking event—Responding to New Realities: Shared Experiences of Civil Society Navigating Shifting Civic Spaces. Through various sessions with consortium members, the event served to broaden the conversation around civic space challenges to include a more diverse group of actors from Serbia. Concretely, the event sought to enable in-depth reflection, discussion, and exchange of experiences and ideas regarding challenges and obstacles to civil society work from around the world; and to provide a dedicated space from participants from Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and North America to engage with each other and identify and share promising and innovative strategies to overcome those challenges. Additionally, a secondary goal of the public event was to encourage new organizations to apply to the next round of Resiliency+ in year three of the INSPIRES project and introduce Internews’ new Local Voices and Public Narrative grant opportunities.
The final day introduced the coaches and facilitators to their respective organizations. The day began with a key discussion on resiliency and what a resilient organization looks like. The coaches and facilitators guided some of the small group discussions to orient everyone to a common idea. The rest of the day focused specifically on relationship-building between the country teams as they planned the upcoming events and touchpoints on the country-level. They decided on key dates for coaches to visit in-person and meet the entire organization, and brainstormed potential moments to work together as an entire cohort. To conclude, all of the participants left certain commitments to the process, uniting themselves as one cohort going through the Resiliency+ process.
