This is going out only to CCI members. (Though please remember that everything in the VoH Forum is visible to all VoH members.) At this time there are six CCI Board members, Bronwyn, Irene, Nwe, Ana Maria, Ronald and myself, plus advisors Joe and Patty, and also Nushi, who I keep including in hopes she can be convinced to join the Board (;-)
An easy action for all CCI Board members is to write a comment on this and other messages posted in VoH. We need to have more participation in order to get things moving. I am curious to hear what everyone thinks about this collective impact grant idea. It is highly ambitious. Too ambitious? Myself I think we need to go for it!
Irene, we were going to get together and you would write up grant applications, asking me questions as you went along. We could still do that for the 15k grant and if you would like to rewrite the LOI below, please do.
I have written up an LOI (Letter of Inquiry) that we might use as a first step towards a grant for a collective impact project to bring the SDGs to San Francisco
A grant for this collective impact project will require a backbone organization as co-applicant. I think we should start by sending letters of inquiry to grant foundations and see how that goes. We will ask them if they will be interested in receiving a joint grant application from CCI and a backbone organization. If they say yes, then we go out to potential backbone organizations to see if one will give it a go.
We are in fairly immediate need of a $15k grant to continue upgrading the VoH technology through 2019. So I suggest we use our idea of a collective impact project as a reason to ask for the $15k. If we are assured of continued upgrade, even at the modest level we are progressing now, then we can put our energy into lining up the ingredients for the SF-SDGs collective impact project.
Letter of Inquiry
Collective Communication, Inc. (CCI) is a California nonprofit with 501(c)(3) status. We are seeking funding for a two year “collective impact” project to bring the UN Sustainable Development Goals SDGs to San Francisco, i.e. as an official policy of the City of San Francisco.
CCI has developed the “Voices of Humanity” (VoH) online social medium as an action oriented platform for human unity and diversity. VoH gives communities collective voices for the genders and ages as well as overall, thus building gender and age equality into the process. We already have a working online forum with monthly collective results and by the end of 2018 will also have a “together and apart” discussion format whereby the nations will each have their own collective voices in alternation with the collective voices for humanity. In the first quarter of 2019 we will implement bottom up inter-community networking.
The together-and-apart format will also be ideal for “across the silos” partnerships, which makes VoH a promising candidate for the “continuous communication” component of a “collective impact” project. For the proposed San Francisco SDGs project, CCI needs a suitable partner to be the backbone for the project. Would (name of funding org) be interested in a joint grant application from CCI and a suitable backbone partner? The grant would be for in the neighborhood of $250,000, with the backbone organization receiving $150k to staff up for a two year project, and CCI to receive $100,000 over the same two years for staff and programming support.
The proposed project will persuade City Hall to adopt the SDGs for San Francisco through 2030. In the process, VoH will demonstrate its ability to bring together larger geographic units, starting with the Bay Area implementation of the SDGs and on up to the national and global levels as a tool that the UN will fund. The global SDG networks are known to have serious difficulties coordinating with each other, as they must do if there is to be major success by 2030, so a tool that has demonstrated the ability to bring organizations together “across the silos” will be well received by the UN.
VoH is in need, too, of a $15,000 grant to fund continued software development through 2019. May we send (name of funding org) a separate grant application for this amount?
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Best to all,
#nvaction, #cci
