Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) Resilience Fund Fellowship 2021

Deadline: January 4, 2021

Applications for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) Resilience Fund Fellowship 2021 are now open. The Resilience Fellowship is a new initiative of the Resilience Fund that provides support and opportunities to a cohort of individuals from around the world, including civil-society actors, human-rights activists, journalists, artists, scholars, policymakers, community leaders and others working to counter the effects of organized crime.

Each year, the Resilience Fellowship will have a chosen theme focusing on a global issue around which fellows will collaborate to find new perspectives and responses, drawn from their diverse but shared experiences in the fight against organized crime. The theme for 2021 is Extortion and organized crime. For the year 2021, a total of 10 Fellows will be selected.

Benefits

The Resilience Fellowship is based on a three-pronged approach:

Sponsorship: Providing financial support, so that Resilience Fellows will have the resources and time to conduct their work on a collaborative project during the fellowship year. Grants of USD$15 000 per fellow will be awarded for one year.
Networking: Offering mentorship opportunities with experts from the GI-TOC; the aim is also to bring Resilience Fellows together on a residency retreat to begin the collaborative project to be undertaken during their fellowship year.
Dissemination: Creating a platform for Resilience Fellows to share their work and ideas publicly – using platforms such as festivals, conferences, civil-society forums, and national and international publications. These will widen public discourse, deepen engagement with society, and elicit support and participation from the general public and, ultimately, policymakers.

Eligibility

Open to individuals of any gender, ethnicity, age, religion, or any other defining factor, who work in communities affected by organized crime.
They can represent the fields of journalism and media; activism; advocacy and community mobilization; the creative arts (including artists, writers, filmmakers and others); community leaders (religious, cultural or youth leaders); academia (researchers and scholars), and the public sector (policymakers).
Individuals from other disciplines will be considered if their work is relevant to the Resilience Fellowship’s objectives and annual theme.
The overall make-up of the 10 Fellows will be diverse and will reflect an equitable geographic and gender balance.

Selection Criteria

Participants should be from countries disproportionately affected by organized crime and/or from least developed countries (LDCs).
Participants should ideally work closely within communities severely affected by extortion related to organized crime, or have strong ties within them, and should have ongoing or established projects or engagement. The cross-border nature of issues relating to organized crime allows applicants working within a wider, non-geographic community to be considered on a case to-case basis. There is no requirement that the Fellow live in the community concerned.
Participants should be able to demonstrate how the funding and support will be used.
Participants who have direct experience in their communities’ issues, related to the annual theme, are particularly encouraged to apply.
Participants must be fluent in at least one of these three languages: Spanish, English and French.
Participants’ prior work should demonstrate a commitment to the ethics and values of the Resilience Fund.

Application

Interested parties must submit an application through the online form provided. This form contains a set of questions where you should highlight the following information:

A description of who you are: your personal details (such as name, nationality, date of birth, etc.) and your work linked to the Fellowship’s theme, extortion as an illicit economy of organized crime.
Your motivation:
- How has organized crime affected your community? (With emphasis on this year’s theme.)
- What does resilience mean to you?
- What have you done to encourage resilience in your community or the community you have been working with?
- What specific problem would you like to help solve in relation to the theme of this Fellowship?
- What actions would you implement with the Fellowship? Identify clear and specifications. If you have received other grants or fellowships please specify which ones and explain the coordination mechanisms you will use to comply with all of them.
- Why do you believe you are a good candidate for this Fellowship?

An outline of the work you have done so far, including links mentioning your work (such as news clippings, videos, documents, publications, etc.)
You will not be able to attach any documents to your application. Please make sure that you have included all relevant information in the online form. It will not be possible to edit it once it has been submitted.

Complete application in English, French or Spanish.