Let’s work together for minority and indigenous rights

We start a new formal partnership in one of three ways:

We are approached

A minority and indigenous led or minority and indigenous rights focused organization facing discrimination, exclusion, persecution or climate injustice asks us to work with and support them. 

We are not a grant making organization on a large scale. Instead, if a potential partner approaches us and we decide to work together, we co-design an intervention that we mutually believe will make a difference in their community. We then seek funding for that work together. This means we are not in a ‘funder: grantee’ relationship but rather have a more equal partnership where we work closely together and report to a funding organization who is a third party.

We work with partners whose aims and values match ours. We seek to ensure we can add value to the partner’s work through our knowledge, contacts and experience, and where the partner’s work fits well with our strategy. Our support to partners is never solely financial.

If a potential new partner approaches us, we check whether the potential partnership duplicates existing work. If it does, we will not take it forward. We will also assess whether our  values, skillset and strategy are a good fit with those of the partner. If so, we will normally co-create potential interventions and then see if we can jointly apply for a suitable source of finance. Depending on how well we know the partner and how high their level of experience is, sometimes we submit the application in our name and then grant the funding to the partner. However, sometimes the partner applies, secures the funding, and then sub-contracts us to support them to do the work, where needed.

The need for support to those facing discrimination in the world today is sadly very high. As a relatively small organization, we unfortunately cannot help everyone who approaches us. However, we will consider any approaches and will reply even if we cannot help immediately or at all. 

Although we normally prefer to work with minority and indigenous-led organizations or those squarely focused on tackling minority and indigenous rights issues, we do sometimes involve a consortium of organizations which brings together not only minority and indigenous community involvement and viewpoints but also other important skills, influence, contacts or resources. As a condition of our work with wider-focused or majority-led organizations, we will expect such partners to be extremely sensitive to giving space and listening properly to the minority and indigenous led organizations in any consortium, and to offer opportunities to transfer control to them over time. 

We approach an organization

We become aware of serious minority or indigenous rights abuses in a country and we reach out to see whether we can find a suitable organization to work with to tackle this together.

In this case, the need for the work is identified by our own staff or contacts. We carefully approach the situation and assess partnership possibilities in a way that ensures any intervention is locally owned and as sustainable as possible. We also aim to ensure that such interventions address the real needs of minority and indigenous communities and will not make things worse. It is rare for us to begin work in this way and we do not respond to external calls to do so.

Through open calls

We publish an open call for proposals that allows organizations working in a particular country to apply for a piece of work that they have designed.

Occasionally, as part of large programmes we issue open calls for proposals from small minority and indigenous led organizations. These are normally small or micro grants. All calls are published on this page.

It is quite common for an open call to follow a training programme and may be designed to allow trainees to put into practice some of what they have learnt. Sometimes, we may build upon a small grant by working with a grantee to design a follow up or new piece of work together (as described above) and seeking funding for that.

If you ever have a concern or a complaint about the way anyone associated with Minority Rights Group has treated you, please contact us. Any feedback will be independently and, as far as possible, confidentially investigated. We want to hear from you if you are unhappy about anything in our relationship.

So we have now gone through all the steps and agreed to become formal partners… exciting! Now what? 

Some organizations sometimes ask us to sign a pre-teaming agreement and we are happy to do that. The last thing we want to do is to steal the ideas of people we want to work with! But we don’t expect our partners to routinely sign such agreements and we don’t have a template that we use. If this is important to you, you can tell us why and we can use a text you have used before or agree the text between us. 

During the design process, you should discuss with your Minority Rights Group contact, how any management and administration percentage will be split between organizations, how your essential staffing, office and governance costs can be met and whether there might be any expectation for you to contribute towards any match funding that the funder we are applying to might require. Regarding covering your administrative costs, we have prepared some useful information here. If you want to learn more about our approach to match funding, you can find more information here. However, the rules vary according to the funder so these are general guidelines. If your contact at Minority Rights Group gives you different advice, you will need to follow that. 

At some point in the early stages of working together (sometimes at the design stage, sometimes when funding is confirmed and for all but the smallest grants), we will ask you to complete a Partnership Agreement and Partner Assessment Template (PAT). The partnership agreement is a general document that describes how we will work together but it does not concern delivering any specific programme work or contractual obligations. It covers our mutual expectations of those we work with to treat every person equally and with respect, and to act both professionally and responsibly. If we receive a complaint from a member of your staff, from a trainee or from another partner organization, that you have acted in ways that don’t live up to human rights norms or to our standards, we will initiate a discussion with you. We will expect your organization to take appropriate and prompt action against any individual or individuals involved who are found to have behaved inappropriately. 

You will also need to complete a PAT which we use to identify both the strong and less developed elements of your organizational set up. This allows us to ensure that we do not overwhelm you with demanding new programmes or give you too much extra responsibility too early on. It also allows us to see where there might be opportunities for us to learn from you or vice versa. There are several sheets within the PAT excel document and depending on the programme work you are co-designing with us, you will complete the grants < £5k sheet, or the grants >£5k sheet. You also need to complete the information sheet. In some cases, for larger grants we may visit you to understand your organization better and to conduct a capacity assessment. In this case, we may fill out the PAT together during this visit.

Once funding is confirmed, we will ask you to sign a contract. This will set out the activities you will complete, the activities or non-financial support that MRG will provide, the results we hope to achieve, any financial support we will provide and the budget for how it will be spent. We need to vary the exact terms of the contract depending on the size of the grant as well as the expectations or requirements of the funder. However, to get a general idea, you can see one sample contract for grants under £5k here, one sample contract for a larger grant to an organization with a turnover under £60k a year here, and one sample contract for a grant over £60k here. 

The contract will explain when you need to report to us. You will need to submit both narrative and financial reports. There will normally be a kick-off meeting, especially for larger grants and for new partners, where we will talk through some ‘dos and don’ts’ and you will be able to ask questions and clarify anything that you don’t understand. If we don’t have that meeting, (or if we do but a query arises later and you are unsure about anything), please do reach out to your Minority Rights Group contact and ask. It is much better to clarify things at the beginning than to get to the end of your activities and to find that you have not recorded everything you need to report to us about. As with the contracts, our reporting formats do vary according to the size and type of programme and what funders need but a fairly standard example is here (financial) and here (narrative). 

MRG will almost always want to review and approve both narrative and financial reports on one phase of work before we send the next tranche of funding. But, at the same time, we know some organizations won’t have cash in the bank to continue working (also bearing in mind that sometimes banks can take a while to move the money). If this is going to hold up the work or make things very difficult for you, let us know and we will see what we can do to find a solution that works best for both of us. 

We love it when you send us photos of your work and sometimes we can use them in our media or social media work or on the website. However, to do this we need the people in the photo to give their signed permission. We won’t normally use photos of children so try not to take photos where individual children can be recognised. 

You should not use Minority Rights Group’s logo on the front cover of a report, film, website or other output unless we have had an opportunity to check and approve the content. We are often happy to co-publish with partners and we know that our reputation for authoritative and quality-controlled content can help gain an audience, but we first need to be sure that we know what is being said. When our logo is used on a front cover, we would normally have been involved in the data collection and will need to be sure that we are comfortable with and confident about methods and contents. However, to ensure transparency, you may, if you wish, include our logo inside any report that we have financially supported with a disclaimer that we contributed funding for it but are not responsible for the contents. Please discuss this with your Minority Rights Group contact, giving reasonable notice before the publication deadline in order to agree the wording, placement etc. 

MRG will ask you to subscribe to our newsletter. This is because opportunities for partners to carry out advocacy, submit evidence, attend training or apply for funding are regularly included, and it is an efficient way for us to contact you. The newsletter is currently only available in English, but we hope that you will be able to use online translators to access the contents regardless, and many of the links will take you to materials produced in other languages. It is also great – if it is safe for you to do so – if you can follow Minority Rights Group on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. Consider whether it is appropriate and useful to tag us when you are posting on your own social media channels and we will share your content with a wider audience, if we can. 

MRG promises to do its utmost to keep your data confidential and safe and we will ask you to do likewise. For instance, if you attend a training event organized by us, we will ask you to understand that other participants may be facing a very severe security situation, similarly at times our staff may be at risk, and we ask that you do your utmost to keep data about their interactions with you password protected or on secure channels. There are many organizations who support NGOs who may come under threat, such as Frontline Defenders, Protect Defenders, or CSO Lifeline. You have the right to ask us to share with you the data that we hold about your organization, and we will always do so (after taking some time to collect and check it). If you want to do this, you can write to your Minority Rights Group contact, [email protected] or use the complaint button if you prefer. 

We really hope that all your security precautions will be effective and that you will never face threats or reprisals as a result of your work with us. But if this does ever  happen. If it is safe to do so, please reach out to us and we will see what we can do to help. We know that our partners take risks to try to advance the cause of equality and human rights and if you face difficulties as a result, we will do what is within our power to mitigate any negative effects. 

If you ever have a concern or a complaint about the way anyone associated with MRG has treated you, please contact us. Any feedback will be independently and, as far as possible, confidentially investigated. We want to hear from you if you are unhappy about anything in our relationship. We can’t always solve every problem, but we will investigate and learn for the future and try to do better for both you and others.

When our funded joint work comes to an end, that does not need to be the end of our relationship.

Firstly, we sometimes design a future phase of work and if we are successful in getting funding for that, our joint work will restart. We would like to be able to offer some continuity between funded work, in the form of continued strategy sharing, joint advocacy and mutual support without any direct grant support. This might depend on the staff time available to us. Sometimes we can, sometimes we cannot. It might also depend on the emergencies happening around the world and and the resulting calls for our help.

Sometimes though, we feel that we need to work less with one partner or community and so we don’t design a ‘next phase’ of our joint work or seek funding for it. This might be because a particular problem has been successfully resolved by a community. But other times it might be because your organization has the resources to work independently. We only really succeed when organizations we have supported can sustain the effort and continue progressing towards equality without our support. Even in these cases, we will want to stay in touch with you. We will aim to tell you about opportunities that could benefit you and involve you in global and collective efforts such as influencing UN-wide processes.

Mastercard Foundation Fund for Resilience and Prosperity is a seven-year, US$ 126 million Fund that aims to support Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) across the agriculture, climate impact, digital economy and health sectors in 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

The main objective of the Fund is to unlock enterprise growth for the purpose of catalyzing, scaling-up and sustaining the creation of dignified and fulfilling work opportunities for young women and men with limited financial means, including young people with disabilities and refugee youth. 

The Fund aims to support an SME portfolio with moderate to high growth potential and innovative SMEs (including women-led SMEs) that have high impact potential and business models suited for work creation within the focus sectors of the Fund, especially for young women and men with limited financial means.

Join a Global Effort to Combat Infectious Diseases – Participate in this survey today!
The Global Partnership is excited to introduce an ongoing scoping initiative, Citizen Data: At the Center of Addressing Infectious Diseases, supported by the Wellcome Trust. This scoping study spans Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, aiming to institutionalize the production and use of citizen data. This effort will enhance our collective response to environmentally sensitive infectious diseases by empowering communities to tell their own stories and define their solutions.We invite you to contribute to this transformative project by participating in this short global survey. This survey seeks to understand the opportunities, challenges, and needs for institutionalizing citizen data, helping to shape infectious disease response, prevention and policies at a global scale.Please share this survey within your networks to maximize its impact. For more details or to connect further, please reach out to Karen Bett at [email protected] and Fatuma Faarah at [email protected].

This grant, mentoring and scholarships programme aims at addressing the shortage of local independent journalism by administering grants to local investigative journalistic projects in Europe and stimulating cross-border collaboration.

This programme will:

• Stimulate local journalists and (small) news outlets to conduct investigative journalism and learn from colleagues in other countries, creating a European network of local (investigative) journalists in the long run.
• Stimulate local journalists and news outlets to compare with other regions and cities in other countries that face similar problems or challenges, which are eminently European issues.
• Increase the dissemination, reach and impact of local investigative journalism.

The grant programme will be open for teams of local investigative journalists and/or local media outlets from at least two different European countries who have good ideas for a local cross-border investigation. For example: journalists and/or news outlets from different comparable cities investigate how their cities cope with e.g. housing, waste, tourism, mobility, etc.

The project should be one that, in principle, could not be realised in this format within the remit of regular journalism – a project that can include cross-border research, networking between colleagues, established and innovative investigative methods and that is at the same time original, innovative and intensive.

Digital Defenders provides civil society organizations with grants of up to €10,000 to be used to cover costs which will directly reduce the risk or impact of a digital attack. The funding covers activities for a maximum of four months.

The Lifeline Embattled CSO Assistance Fund provides emergency financial assistance to civil society organizations (CSOs) under threat or attack and rapid response advocacy and resiliency grants to support CSOs in responding to broader threats against civic space.