Activist Funds For the Commons

PROJET

Ce qui sera produit : Organisation
Début : décembre 2016

Partenaire.s: EDGE Europe
Type d'action: Financer les communs
Rôle de Remix: Partenaire

Une trentaine de militants ont participé à l'élaboration d'une vision et d'idées pour lancer ce qui deviendra Fundaction (un fond géré par les activistes européens) lors d'une réunion qui a eu lieu à Séville en décembre 2016. À la suite de cette rencontre, début de 2018, chacun d'entre eux a reçu cinq invitations à envoyer à d'autres militants de toute l'Europe afin d'augmenter le nombre de membres pour une phase de prototypage. Après l'évaluation du prototype, le fonds a été lancé vers la mi-2018.

Lien vers le site web du projet : http://www.fundaction.eu
Objet(s) de commun : Financement
Enjeu(x) : Autogestion
Action(s) : Fond autogéré européen
Résultat(s) : Amplifier le soutien au actions militantes radicales

There will be a participatory fund for European activists under the name FundAction. The website and decision-making platform are in the process of being developed and prototyped the latter in beginning of 2018.

About 30 activist members were involved in developing a vision and ideas for the fund in a meeting that took place at Sevilla in december 2016. At the beginning of 2018, each of them will receive five invites to be sent to other activists from across Europe in order to grow the membership for the prototyping phase. Therefore, following the evaluation of the prototype, the fund will fully launch around mid-2018.

Lettre annonçant les activités du fonds

Sujet: Update on FundAction: the participatory fund and platform for European activism
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2017 15:29:02 +0100
De: Rose Longhurst

Dear friend,

I hope you're well. Firstly, apologies if someone has already spoken with you about this - we haven't been able to get in touch with some people, so we thought it would be best to just reach out to you all!

So: the FundAction Facilitation Group (the folk designated after La Bergerie - see below for the list!) has been meeting weekly since the beginning of May 2017, and we felt it was time to update everyone.

In the past weeks, we spoke 1-1 with about half of the people who were in Sevilla to develop ideas. This email is an update, especially for those of you we didn't speak to individually. Please feel free to respond via email, or if you'd like to call and chat, we can do that too - just let us know a convenient time and someone will get in touch.

In summary, the essential purpose (3 types of grants, an online community etc.) developed in Sevilla / La Bergarie has not changed. But several practical decisions have been made, and things are coming together like this:

1. We're hoping to launch the website and decision-making platform by the beginning of October

To make decisions about grant applications, we shall be using Decidim, the participatory platform BCN en Comu use. We looked into several other platform options like e.g. Loomio but finally settled on Decidim for now because of the functionality and development opportunities it offers. Laura/Romy have led on this. The website is being built by two guys from https://caira.info/. Lucas is leading on this and related comms stuff.

2. We will then be reaching out to you to grow the initial fund membership throughout October

We felt that in the initial pilot phase, it made sense to build on the relationships we currently have, just to test the platform and grant-making process. Therefore we'll be asking each of you to invite five other activists to join the online platform in a few weeks. FundAction members will be able to submit proposals and score others' proposals.

3. We'll launch with the Exchange/Capacity Building grants ('Rethink') at the end of October

We'd like to do the larger, systemic change grants ('Renew') soon too, but we're still trying to work out the legalities of what we can/can't fund. We have some ideas for the rapid response grants but as they'll be most complicated to implement we're going to wait until we've tested the process.

4. We're currently using EDGE Funders Alliance to host the fund

Although this isn't ideal, as it limits what we can fund, we felt it was too much to establish our own legal structure in this first phase. Therefore EDGE will be hosting us (e.g. processing payments) until the first phase is over. Vedran and Nico have been leading on the legal and finance side here.

5. There will be an Assembly (community) meeting on 6 - 8 April 2018

This will be held at La Bergerie in France, and will be an opportunity to review progress, strategy and design next steps. We will also review/renew the Facilitation group and see what resourcing is needed to continue.

There have been lots of other activities along the way, but this is the basic practical stuff. We'll be launching a blog in the coming weeks too, to allow us to document in an accessible and transparent way some of the decisions we've made. We've had some really tough conversations!

Do you have any thoughts or questions? How would you like to continue being involved?

We hope that you will be an active member of the platform, and invite others to join too. We would also welcome support in organising the April Assembly meeting. We may also be seeking an additional FG member/coordination support over the coming weeks too.

There are lots of opportunities to feed back, contribute and support, and we would welcome your input. Please drop me an email if you have anything you'd like to say whatsoever!

We'll be in touch in the coming weeks to invite you to the platform and to ask you to invite others in your network to join too. So please keep your eyes open for this!

Thanks,

Rose (on behalf of the whole FundAction facilitation group: Laura, Romy, Nico, Lucas, Walter, Vedran, Serap and Menno)