Past Civil Society Fund Initiatives

In recent years, CSF country office initiatives focused on good governance and social accountability with most programs supporting civil society organization (CSO) capacity building, inclusion and human rights, youth empowerment and partnership development, all critical components to advancing the civic engagement agenda.

Examples in the area of governance include Albania’s support to roundtables, debates, media awareness campaigns, and monitoring systems encouraged citizens to increase political transparency and participation.  Poland funded a project on e-Democracy to stimulate and facilitate communication between civil society and the public sector.

Capacity building of civil society organizations; learning and knowledge sharing components of the CSF feature prominently in many country programs.  For example, Colombia supported technical assistance workshops on project preparation and compliance with legal regulations.  In addition the CSF Secretariat is finalizing program development and management “tools” for CSOs on the topics of Budgeting, Grant Proposal Writing, Financial Systems, Monitoring and Evaluation, Project Development, Reporting, and Resource Mobilization.

Demonstrative of inclusion and human rights, several CSF activities used theater and other creative forms of expression to promote human rights through civic engagement.  In Serbia, actors and musicians from the Dah Theatre Research Center brought their portrayal of the performance “Invisible City and Neighbors” to passengers on Belgrade’s bus line.  The theatre made a city bus their stage to test citizen ideas of tolerance.  Other civil society grantees used traditional means to disseminate information on policies and rights-based bills such as the domestic violence bill of Ghana.

Youth civic engagement remains a high priority as many COs chose to focus their CSF activities on youth.  The FY06 publication, Engaging Young People as Credible and Informed Stakeholders (linked to the LRC launching of the WDR on Youth) was the catalyst for a dialogue with 10 Youth Ministries at a policy conference in Caracas, October 2006.  Other efforts included the Central Asia Regional Youth Summer Camp organized by the Association of Young Leaders of Kazakhstan, near Almaty in August 2006.