Seed in 2005 and beyond

Supporting Seed Award finalists

Over the next months, the Seed Initiative will continue to support the 12 finalist partnerships, providing them with partnership building training and advice, assistance in securing long-term funding and investment, developing media strategies, and following up leads and contacts made during the 3rd IUCN World Conservation Congress in Bangkok .

This support will be directed along three main lines:

• Partnership building: helping the partners work together in the most effective and efficient way and report learning back into the partner institutions;
• Capacity building: providing tools, training and access to experts to help the partnership implement its work programme;
• Opportunity building: facilitating access to funders and connections with other organizations and programmes and potential new partners; referring to opportunities/sources of technical assistance

And the winner is...

A panel of international, multi-disciplinary judges, carefully selected to represent a broad range of stakeholder groups, will consider the finalists’ submissions for consideration in early February 2005.

The five winners of the Seed Awards 2005/06 will be announced at an awards ceremony and reception during the 13 th meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, 11-22 April 2005.

The awards are non-financial, but rather provide a highly-flexible package of individually-targeted support, connections and facilitated access to funders to give winning partners every chance of success. This support will be continued for as much as one year after the announcement of the winners. The most important distinction between the assistance given to winners and that given to finalists is that winners will receive on-the-ground support, including detailed needs assessments, performed by relevant specialists and other services, delivered in part through the UNDP, UNEP and IUCN country offices.

Seed Research and Learning

2005 will see the creation of Seed's Research and Learning channel. The channel will follow the evolution of Seed Award-winning partnerships, to learn from them and to create material to assist future partnership practitioners. It will also perform research aimed at policy makers, looking into the specific needs and potential of the type of partnerships Seed supports - nascent entrepreneurial partnerships with a strong local focus.

Seed Associate Partners Network

Seed will continue to build its ‘Associate Partners Network’; an international network of organizations actively working to encourage the use of the partnership paradigm to ensure the sustainability of partnership projects.

Associate partners are vital to Seed for their contribution to Seed’s work in a number of areas. First, they assist in Seed’s outreach activities by publicizing any significant developments of the Seed Initiative. Second, they provide services and assistance to Seed’s award winning partnerships. Third, they contribute to the Research and Learning Channel, sharing experiences, case studies, training materials with other members. Fourth, they help to facilitate new and support existing partnerships in their local regions, and finally, they provide a collective input into international processes related to partnerships such as the International Partnerships Forum.

19 organizations from across the world are currently members of the Seed Associate Partners Network, representing a broad range of interests and issues. Many work locally with civil society groups, government agencies and local business to achieve social, environmental and development goals, others act globally to encourage and facilitate the use of partnerships for international development.

It is hoped that the APN will grow organically over the coming months and will expand as Seed’s profile is raised through participating in international conferences, and as a result of media attention and the successes of the finalist partnerships.

Return to newsletter front page