Deadline Date: 18-Aug-2023
The Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) is inviting applications for the Conscious Food Incubator to support the experimentation of innovative approaches to transform food systems through the cultivation of inner capacities, to scale up and accelerate progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA), convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.
The vision of the Alliance is anchored in the realisation that they have the science, technical capacity and technological tools needed to transform food systems; however, these solutions are not delivering the impact needed. To understand why, they must examine the collective blind spots and look beyond the problems’ symptoms, patterns and structures, at what fundamentally drives the systems. Consciousness and mental models are increasingly recognized as the key to unlock systems change.
Objectives:
• The cultivation of inner capacities for regenerative food systems constitutes a new field of practice which requires testing and innovation to identify, develop and nurture potentially transformative solutions.
• The Conscious Food Incubator creates a space for collective experimentation and learning, through prototyping and testing different approaches for cultivating inner capacities of stakeholder across food systems, which can inspire scaling up of successful experiences. The learnings and solutions generated through the Conscious Food Incubator are intended to support people in cultivating and applying these capacities and approaches, while also embedding them in UNDP’s own ways of working, to maximise development impact towards the SDGs.
The objectives of the Program:
• To test and demonstrate how consciousness approaches can strengthen inner capacities that in turn help accelerate the transformation of food systems to make them more regenerative, sustainable and equitable.
• To generate a set of learnings and learning resources – in the form of case studies, training materials, trainers and partners – which can be used to scale-up the integration of consciousness-based practices and strengthening of inner capacities for food systems transformation.
Funding Information:
• Through this first round of call for proposals for the Conscious Food Incubator, UND will fund approximately four pilot interventions of up to US $20,000.
• Technical support from CoFSA Secretariat to refine your intervention strategy, facilitate implementation (e.g. connections with relevant CoFSA partners) and support the capitalization of lessons learnt leveraging the CoFSA MEL framework;
• UNDP CoFSA will promote the selected Conscious Food intervention to a broader audience across its network.
Geographic Focus:
There is no specific geographic focus or restriction on the location of beneficiaries or applicants for the Conscious Food Incubator. Interventions can target stakeholders at local, regional and/or global levels, they can focus on one country or have multi-country focus (e.g. through online delivery options). Proposals can be submitted by applicants in any location.
Eligibility Criteria
• Civil society and (national or international) non-governmental organizations, including non-governmental academic or educational institutions.
• Private sector and commercial entities, and governmental organizations (e.g. regional governments, municipalities, etc.) are not eligible.
• Individuals are not eligible.
• Partnerships between eligible organisations or institutions are permitted, but a lead applicant is required. All partners must satisfy the eligibility criteria as applicable to the lead applicant.
Interventions Criteria:
The proposed intervention must meet the following interventions criteria.
• CoFSA Principles: the proposed intervention must generally align with CoFSA Principles for Cultivating Inner Capacities.
• Application Form and Award Amount: The Applicant must apply for an Award of up to $20,000 and submit a duly completed application form.
• Applicants cannot be on the UNDP Vendor Ineligibility List.
Evaluation and Selection Criteria
• All grant proposals will be reviewed by the Evaluation Committee comprised of relevant UNDP representatives. The Evaluation Committee will assess proposals according to the following evaluation criteria:
• Strategic Relevance for CoFSA Agenda and Learning: proposals will be assessed on their strategic relevance to advance CoFSA agenda (such as core areas of interventions etc.) as well as commitment and potential to advancing learning on conscious food systems. (30%)
• Quality of Intervention: the coherence, clarity, and overall quality of the proposal (including relevance of the proposed budget) will be carefully assessed, as well as the expertise and experience of the project team or delivery partner(s). (30%)
• Implementation Capacity: all Applicants must demonstrate their expertise and capacity to implement their proposed interventions within the set timeframe, in particular adequate financial, material, human and other non-financial resources, and an advanced proposed design of the intervention. At a minimum, Applicants will need to have at least 2 years of experience in the relevant sector. (30%)
• Application of CoFSA Principles: the extent to which the CoFSA principles are applied will be carefully appraised (e.g. fine-tuning to adapt to the local context, harnessing local resources and a plurality of knowledge and wisdom, sensitivity in tackling power dynamics, etc.). (10%)
• The diversity of the portfolio of interventions (including geographic, thematic, target beneficiaries, etc.) may also be considered by the evaluation panel. Where multiple proposals of similar quality are received, priority will be given to proposals which benefit stakeholders in low/middle income countries.
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