Civil Society Development Platform Marketplace http://cd-platform.org is offering possibilities for civil society organizations to increase their organizational potential with the help of learning, counseling and other services that could be received from experts in various fields of organizational development.
The platform offers support in the form of mini-grants that pay for services aimed at both enhancing major organizational capabilities and obtaining special skills that will allow CSOs becoming more efficient, independent and viable. The following types of grants are available:
Grants for organizational development of CSOs
Grants for development of organizational and technical possibilities in the HIV/AIDS sector
Organizational development includes the development of four types of capacities:
- Technical capacities are capabilities in the sphere of an organization’s immediate activities. This includes better services, rendered by organizations to their target audiences; adoption of standards of organizations’ activities; development of competences in certain segment of an organization’s activity. For instance, a human rights protection organization’s technical capabilities include gaining more knowledge in human rights and creation of skills for human rights protection with the use of various approaches and mechanisms.
- Organizational capacities are capabilities required for sustainable, consistent, and reliable implementation of its mission and tasks by an organization. These capabilities provide for development of systems and structures of governance and management of an organization, financial management, development of human resources, mobilization of resources, etc. For instance, if an organization operates in human rights sector, its organizational capacities include improvement of operation of governance bodies, the organization’s management, project management, better abilities to mobilize finance or human resources for the human rights protection purposes, etc.
- Adaptive capacities are capacities that focus on an organization’s ability to react to political, socio-economic and cultural changes that affect the environment in which organizations operate. With the purpose of the adaptive abilities, the following skills are important: strategic and operational planning, assessment and evaluation skills, operational planning based on assessments, etc.
- Influential power is the ability of organizations to affect the environment in which they operate. Such abilities include advocating skills, negotiation skills, communication skills, cooperation and partnership development within the sector and with actors from other sectors. For instance, if an organization operates in the sector of human rights protection, its influential power means its ability to affect decision making and to involve partners from various sectors of the society with the purpose of issue solution.
The small grants system for organizational development of the civil society organizations in Ukraine has been launched by the international organization Pact Inc within the UNITER program aimed at support of CSOs organizational capacities. The system turned out to be needed by its recipients and has been further supported by USAID and SIDA, as well as by the USAID project on service capacity increase for HIV/AIDS sector in Ukraine.
‘Ednannia’ has administrated the small grants system in Ukraine since 2012, and the whole Marketplace system since 2014.
