Louis from Co-ops UK mentioned this grant programme in a meeting today. The turn around is fairly tight (end Aug) but could be of interest to co-ops to support education about democracy and participation.
Adding a seminar with more info. Could be particularly interesting to those working in co-op development and goveranance training?
Thanks for sharing this! I had a look into it, primarily interested from a tech co-operative point of view. I thought I’d share my summary:
It’s £25-50k in grant funding and they are interested essentially in projects which engage citizens to local government. Many of the examples relate to in-real-life agitation around local politics, but one section stood out as potentially relevant to a tech co-op:
Deliberative forums- creating safe, structured spaces for dialogue where citizens can discuss issues and share perspectives and engage place‑based decision‑makers on community perspectives.
This may include the use of digital deliberative democracy tools where appropriate.
I have some colleagues working on open-source deliberative democracy tools, which are very interesting, but they are based in the EU.
I wondered if this information may be of interest to other readers!