About
Project Vision
To support community-based, sustainable food initiatives to build capacity to create video proposals, in order to attract start-up (including crowd-sourced) funds, small grants and wider network-based support.
Background
In the face of today’s multifaceted global challenges, community-based local food initiatives are becoming increasingly important. However, despite the fact that great ideas for low-cost, dynamic solutions to food insecurity are often already present at the grassroots level, community-based organisations (CBOs) often have the least access to start-up funding and the least capacity to develop funding proposals.
With the rise of smartphones, the means of both generating and sharing video is becoming ever more prevalent. It is important that donor organisations now adapt grant-giving processes so that digital video can be mobilised in ways that enhance the accessibility of funding and give greater space to local initiatives and community voice. At the same time, it is critical that CBOs build their own capacity to harness the power of video and related ICTs, to communicate their ideas and thus, become more capable of attracting start-up funds.
Ten years ago, a handbook on “Making Video Proposals” was developed by Dr. Pamela Richardson-Ngwenya for the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Environment Facility (UNDP GEF) Barbados office, as a first attempt to support community groups to make video applications to their Small Grants Programme (SGP). Since then, digital technology has moved on a pace, with smartphones, apps, video technologies and wi-fi becoming increasingly prevalent and easily accessible, even for lower income communities in the Global South. Make it Grow is currently working to revise and update the methodological toolkits available to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and CBOs, to better support communities worldwide to create video proposals to support their own online fundraising campaigns and to submit to international donors.
Project Funding
Make it Grow is a Knowledge Exchange project for the Institute for Sustainable Food, University of Sheffield, supported by the UKRI’s Economic and Social Research Council.