New Application Process for ACP Grant Applicants — Abortion Conversation Projects
Applicants, please read carefully.
Effective immediately, we at Abortion Conversation Projects are trying something new. We want your project idea to “work” before you submit an actual application. First, we’d like you to fill out our online idea form to tell us about your project idea. We will review and invite projects that we feel could benefit from our input for a virtual brainstorming session. Let’s “workshop” it together.
So, what does “workshop” mean? Normally, we are not in favor of turning nouns into verbs, but “workshopping” captures a group process where we discuss, ask questions, suggest, comment on an idea. Feedback, critique, brainstorming are other words that can have the same meaning.
In practical terms, we invite you (more than one if you want) to present your idea briefly to a group of people with different skills, perspectives, and experiences. ACP usually meets on Zoom which can handle a phone or internet connection. A meeting is a small group that will discuss your project idea with the goal of making it better. Better means 1) effectively addressing abortion stigma, 2) talking about it, 3) organizing your community to support it, 4) doing evaluation to measure success.
Since this is the first year we are doing this, we hope to select a limited number of projects to move to the workshopping phase. From these, we will invite you to include what you like in our feedback and submit a formal proposal for seed grants.
What are we looking for? What are we looking for? Good question! Of course we will look for projects that we like. We want innovative approaches to reducing stigma at any of the levels that stigma exists (the personal individual, community, media, institutional policy etc. site link). We love grassroots communities that foster face-to-face conversations. We want projects that can be tested and show the promise of certain approaches in many different settings. We want evidence!
We also believe that tapping into our expertise and experience is at least as important as the relatively small amount of funds we can offer. The projects that were able to contact us had the best results and the best chance of sustainability. Besides, it’s the job we love the most.
What if you are not selected? It’s not because you don’t have good ideas. Or even if we don’t like it. That is we like to choose projects where we can offer meaningful feedback. And we can still talk to you about your project on a one-to-one basis. Or, we can discuss resubmitting the proposal in the next cycle. We’re a small board (want to join us?) and we need to use our time and talent in the most efficient way possible.
That said, send us your ideas! The form is quite simple and writing down your thoughts will help with planning. We really want to hear from you.
Thank you for the work you do to challenge stigma!
