Thank you for following us in the past 1 year! It has been a pleasure serving the network of more than 800 youth organisations. We hope to keep up the work in the coming years!
UN HABITAT Urban Youth Fund application deadline extended
The UN HABITAT Urban Youth Fund submission deadline has been extended to 20 April 2013. However, queries and questions will only be answered until 18 April.
The Fund supports youth projects in urban areas of developing countries. Read more
Costa Rican Youth Reflect Upon Fashion, Identity and Consumption
A new project called El Costurero Público (‘public atelier’, or ‘clothing workshop’) encourages youth of lower income families to think about fashion. Using clothing and accessory design as a didactic strategy for popular education, this initiative invites young people to collectively construct a critical vision of the fashion production/consumption system and its relationship with their own identities, their bodies and important topics such as gender, sexuality, environmental issues and human rights.
The project was created by an interdisciplinary team of young social entrepreneurs in 2012, and was granted funds by the Student Social Action Initiatives (Iniciativas Estudiantiles de Acción Social) of the University of Costa Rica to be implemented this year. El Costurero Público had its first session on the 16th of March. Since then, the project has received much positive feedback, including one participant’s comment on El Costurero´s facebook page that he was “satisfied with this proposal; that is to say, […] completely interested.”
One of the principal questions of the first workshop was, “What does it mean to dress normally?” Most participants introduced themselves by saying that they wear “normal” clothes, even though there was no “one” style of clothing that could define the group.
The sessions of El Costurero Público take place at Parque la Libertad (‘Liberty Park’) in Desamparados, Costa Rica. If you would like more information, you can visit the project’s blog or its facebook page.
Guest post by Silvia Rivera Alfaro
Photos: Alberto Borge Araya
UN HABITAT Urban Youth Fund open until 15 April
The UN HABITAT Urban Youth Fund is accepting applications!
The Fund supports urban youth in developing countries. It provides grants up to USD 25,000 to youth-led (15-32 years) projects piloting innovative approaches to employment, good urban governance, shelter and secure tenure. These grants aim at promoting youth empowerment as the solution for better urban governance.
Application deadline: 15 April 2013
Under30 Annual Report 2012
We are happy to present you with our first annual report “Why young people’s contribution is vital for sustainable development and what we have done to support it” (pdf). In one year, Under30 has brought together a network of 84 youth organisations around the world and reached out to over 800. In twelve months, we have disseminated around 60 “youth-friendly” funding opportunities, from both public and private donors, within our network and we have helped several organisations develop project proposals and apply for funding.
We have chosen the provocative name Under30 – The Youth Development Agency to signal our intention to step away from the old understanding of youth as at best a passive target of development cooperation and at worst even a threat to security and social stability. Instead, we believe that young people should be involved as partners and leaders in development cooperation.
In this report, you will find an overview of what we have achieved in 2012, our priorities for the year to come, and our views on some policy issues which are very important for young people, among them, youth unemployment, youth obesity, and access to funding through crowd-funding.
We hope you will enjoy and we look forward to your feedback!
Youthfully yours,
The Under30 Team
Maternal and child health in focus
January 2013 brought a lot of opportunities for projects focusing on health of children, pregnant women and mothers. Here is a brief overview of the current funding opportunities to help you decide which grant you could apply for with your project.
The Saving Lives at Birth Fund (Deadline 21 Febr) focuses on the health of pregnant women close to delivery and newborn babies and looks for projects which provide assistance in child-labour and post-natal care. The grant primarily looks for innovative ideas and they do not fund “Proven approaches that have already tackled scale up challenges in low and middle income countries”. This means that if you have something new, something that is not the traditional way of doing things, you might have a strong chance to get funded.
They support projects in the following three main domains: science and technology, service delivery and demand-side innovation, so if your project addresses the lack of any of these three factors, you should consider applying. They encourage partnerships so you should definitely apply if you teamed up with other organisations.
Another good opportunity for project focusing on maternal health is the funds of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which provides support for Maternal, Newborn, & Child Health projects. Read the rest of this entry
Under30 is 1 year old!
Happy holidays
The Under30 team wishes you happy holidays and a good start for the New Year!
December 2012 newsletter is out
We have just sent out the last newsletter of 2012 with the latest funding opportunities for youth organisations. In this issue you can find some new grants for organisations, for example, among others, from the National Endowment for Democracy or the Commonwealth Foundation and a country-specific grant for Indonesian projects from UNESCO.
We also have many opportunities for young individuals: training programmes, conference and contests open to a wide range of audience.
If you are interested, check out the latest issue of our newsletter here.
If you wish to receive the next in your mailbox, you can sign up here. It’s free.
