Throughout each year, Necessity will offer various funding opportunities in alignment with its core themes. Our hope is that this will not only help support the capacity development of people, projects and networks across the UK, but also create a continual stream of ideas, provocations and learning for everyone who visits the site.
Each new funding opportunity will require certain levels of information, but the core aspect of the site is to develop relationships and foster a collaboration culture. This in turn will help identify emerging research themes and opportunities, which will also be funded.
FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
This is the first of three funding rounds that will feature on Necessity over the next 12 months. Our hope in creating these opportunities is:
- To release capacity within people, projects and networks to do work that may be of real interest, but would be difficult to find resources and time to pursue.
- To contribute into the development of work and research that opens fresh insights across Necessity’s five themed areas.
- To produce fresh community stories and learning that can be shared within and beyond the Necessity site
ROUND ONE – COMMUNITY INVESTIGATIONS
We are interested in supporting community investigations that aim to explore the consequences and impact of COVID 19. Having said that, we are in agreement with the academic Silvia Federici, who said recently that ‘the pandemic has ‘magnified and made visible the impossibility of our current system’, exposing the crises and inequalities’ present within 21st century societies.
We particularly encourage applications that will attempt to delve beneath the surface and ask more radical questions of the UK society dynamics. These are times that require the ability to disrupt and dislodge the ways of thinking and living that feed into the complicated systems in which we all dwell. We are interested in exploring ways of engaging that align with the need to change the way we live in the world.
We ask for outrage, not smart reports, we seek passion and creativity, not politeness. Current approaches to defeating poverty; domestic violence; environmental catastrophes etc. are simply not working. We need alternative solutions that bypass managerial, career making, ego-(plat)forming organisations. We need to embrace and be honest about the fact that everyone is complicit in systems which entrap and domesticate the struggle to dismantle unfair systems.
This is not an invitation to fill your revenue streams, to make further contributions to you CVs. This is a call of lament; a cry in the dark – from a place of weakness and broken hopes. The world is not right, neither are we. We are looking for the breadcrumb trails that might lead us through the darkness, for what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing refers to in The Mushroom at the End of the World as “third nature’; the assemblages and practices emerging, almost imperceptibly in the ruins.
We are allocating £300K in this first round. We welcome bids of up to £30K and are open to a variety of approaches, including written reports, films and podcasts.
Particular areas of interest:
- Your land, this land ain’t your land’ – ownership, access and connection; rethinking food systems, dislodging extraction etc
- The home is the castle – sovereign power, particularly in relationship to sexualised and domestic violence
- It’s pay back time – Austerity on steroids. What does resistance look like?
- Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? – housing, rent and the creative struggle for alternatives, work, employment, homelessness
- Painting by numbers – challenging gentrification, culture-washing and consumption
- Life in the Ruins – what are the possibilities for different ways of being, in our bodies, on the land, in our homes, communities, and work? The possibilities for deeper connections and radical re-enchantment of our lives?
- The missing pieces – voices and stories we are not hearing
Please send expressions of interest in the first instance, with a brief (up to three-four paragraphs) outline of your proposal by September 21, 2020 to funding@necessity.info. We will aim to get in touch with you within two weeks (by October 5) to follow up on your proposal if you have been successful.
We envisage the funding period for investigations lasting six months from October 2020 to Apri 2021l.