Google Drive
Gist
Clipboard
NUMUN FUND SEED, GROW & SUSTAIN GRANT
FULL APPLICATION FORM
Thank you for responding to the invitation to submit a full application for the Seed, Grow and Sustain grant. Your initial submission has been longlisted after an initial prioritisation process by the Numun Fund team, and this form is the full application form for the grant. This will be reviewed by a community-led selection committee. You can find out more about decision-making process, as well as the committee, on our website here.
The form contains FOUR (4) parts. The questions are intended to give the community-led selection committee a better sense about how you are organising, who you work with, what is your idea of change, and the kinds of resources you are seeking and might also be able to offer to the community.
Some of these questions may be repeats of the ones you have responded to before in the initial submission, and we appreciate your patience for filling this in again as the group reading this form will not be reading the previous one you submitted. The community-led selection committee are not the same people who did the longlisting, and as such, will not have read what you submitted before. Please feel free to copy and paste from your previous submission, or take the opportunity to provide more information to give us a better sense of who you are. All applications are read with the assumption that English is not the first language of the applicant.
Note that all questions marked with asterisks (*) are required. We ask that you please read the questions and instructions carefully. Please be mindful of word limits and select responses you are to provide (e.g. based on the grant type you are applying for), so that the information you provide is clear.
= PLEASE WRITE DOWN YOUR RESPONSES OFFLINE BEFORE SUBMITTING ONLINE =
Please draft and finalise your responses in this plaintext application form before submitting online through https://form.jotform.com/222342547368459
This is so that in case you encounter any technical glitches, you can email your responses in the completed plaintext form to us at grants@numun.fund, with with subject header: FullAppl_SGS_2022_yournumber (change yournumber with your unique ID number).
===============================================================
===============================================================
IruWay Collective
SGS_2022_0721
Shalini A
https://open.janastu.org/labs/anthill
https://iruway.janastu.org and https://crafts.janastu.org
The significantly illustrative site, COW Landing, is on the community networks COWMesh server (not public on the Internet)
As a collective, many of us have a number of social media accounts that we do not aggregate
instagram: @crafter_space @servelots (also facebook and twitter)
Janastu is 20 years old (yr 1999), but the collective is happening dynamically, with many in the current configuration are over the last 5 years.
About 20 people. And we are continously adding community members to our work team in the spirit of COW*2 which is Community Operationalized by Women
Iruway collective is an open source space for community engagement, with the intent of holistically connecting to issues of women and girls. Iruway Labs started with COWMesh and Community Network tools initiating collaborations that lead to Crafts and Makerspaces, Community Radio, Electric vehicles, Feminist Playground, Permaculture, Design and Art Studio, Anthillhacks workshops and cooking events.
South Asia, India.
11.2. Countries: please list all countries where your work is based
{* Answer here}
India
Please provide 2-3 references that can share with us more about your work, leadership and context. Please let them know that we will contact them via email within the month of you submitting your application in relation to this grant. They will only be contacted for the reason of this grant application alone, and their contact information will not be stored or used beyond this express purpose.
12.1. Reference 1:
- Name of person: Cynthia
- Contact details (email, and/or mobile number, and/or @SocialMediaHandles (please give us 2 ways of getting in touch with them if possible): cynthia@apc.org signal: +12269631908
- Group or organisational affiliation (if applicable): APC
- Relationship with your initiative/collective/group/organisation (e.g. collaborator, funder, partner, community member etc): Funder and collaborator
12.2. Reference 2:
- Name of person: Ramaseshan S
- Contact details (email, and/or mobile number, and/or @SocialMediaHandles (please give us 2 ways of getting in touch with them if possible): null@voidspace.xyz & twitter handle:@voidspaceXYZ
- Group or organisational affiliation (if applicable): Chiguru Coop and https://csterc.com/
- Relationship with your initiative/collective/group/organisation (e.g. collaborator, funder, partner, community member etc): Collaborator
12.3. Reference 3 (optional)
- Name of person: Padmini Ray Murray
- Contact details (email, and/or mobile number, and/or @SocialMediaHandles (please give us 2 ways of getting in touch with them if possible): p.raymurray@gmail.com, twitter handle: @praymurray
- Group or organisational affiliation (if applicable): Design Beku
- Relationship with your initiative/collective/group/organisation (e.g. collaborator, funder, partner, community member etc): Collaborator
What level of funding are you applying for? (delete all that do not apply)*:
Grow
===================================
===================================
ALL: Who are the THREE (3) primary communities that you are working with (we understand women to be defined in all of their diversity - trans, cis, non-binary, young, older, disabled etc) (delete all that do not apply), twitter handle: @blnaveen
ALL: What are the primary feminist tech issues your collective/initiative/group/organisation are engaging in? (Delete all that do not apply. Please pick FIVE (5) max)*
x 1. Access to technology & gender disparities
2. Safety and freedom from violence
3. Feminist expression, including artistic engagement with science
4. Knowledge building & right to information
5. Gender, media & dis/misinformation
6. Artificial intelligence
7. Privacy, consent & embodiment
x 8. Technology infrastructure and development
9. Internet policy, regulation & governance
10. Movement-building & organising around technology
x 11. Decolonising the internet
x 12. Feminist frameworks and imagination of technology
x 13. Memory and archival politics
14. Alternative economies and technology
15. Data activism (including open data)
16. Other (please list)
If you're applying for:*
3.1. SEED: What is your main idea that you will be seeding? Please elaborate on how technology is a key part of your analysis and approach. Please also share relevant contextual information, such as challenges or specific issues you are trying to address. {Answer here, max 500 words}
3.2. GROW: How would you like to grow your strategies and/or activism in the grant period? Please elaborate on how you integrate technology as part of your analysis and approach. Please also share relevant contextual information, such as challenges or specific issues you are trying to address. {Answer here, max 400 words}
4.add about what shalini was saying why women need money
5.to get children to school
Our approach in the community is holistic and centres around encouraging their expression and
bringing necessary introductions regarding skilling women for their aspirations and gig interests.
In order to establish and enhance communication in the region, we set up COWMeshes
in Devrayanadurga area. COWMesh uses WiFI and other low cost deregulated media to share content locally, deploy services, for sub-communities who curate content for their needs and utilise a hyper-media archive architecture for their story telling, publishing and navigation needs or for online classes during the Covid lockdown period. This was an addition to the Community Radios that we had set up in the region that has helped women and local communities in articulating their experiences and their expression.
Through hand making activity at CrafterSpace with device assisted tools, we intend to integrate local and collective crafts into wider urban economies and value chains that can help create economically and environmentally sustainable products while generating livelihood opportunities that benefit and centre around women.
Our key activities includes:
With resident artists, longer term leadership subgroups and our support from
Community Operationalized by Women (COW*2), we look at the nuances and complexities
that lie in the situation that exists. Keeping conversations open and having dialogue is our
idea of feminism. We translate that to technology in terms of storytelling and collective
sense making so as to reduce the barrier of literacy or digital capabilities.
While our major focus is to give some financial stability to women with a
space to explore, share and grow.
-o-o-o-
3.3. SUSTAIN: What are you main strategies for the next 3 years? Please elaborate on how you integrate technology as part of your analysis and approach. Please also share relevant contextual information, such as challenges or specific issues you are trying to address. {Answer here, max 400 words}
We start the year with the AnthillHacks event lasting 9 days. We get COW*2 to help organise sessions in a number of locations in the area. For this we use different nodes in the mesh network in order to be proximally closer to each of the community neighborhoods and stream events on the community network and also open the event to a large number of creative people from the region who include designers, technologists, community activists, educators and local governing bodies, architects and craftspeople, community radio and storytellers, feminist artists and gender non-conformists, adventure and theater groups, bio-diversity experts and bio-fertiliser makers to participate in the event and also to engage with the communities. We also use this opportunity to schedule a year long list of activities and engagements with the community.
Multi-tiered Workshops for crafts, design and communications that generate livelihood opportunities along with technological aid and reform, centering women's skills, expression, empowerment and financial benefits.
Feminist technology playground actvities that help codify practices of craft, create archives that respect culture and evolve through intersectional practices that have emerged from women and working classes/castes that have faced oppression over the years.
With resident technologists, artists, architects and social innovators we wish to create a living lab of productive community engagement that sustains as a cafeteria, product and services development space.
Co-create mesh-network activities and applications so as to celebrate and promote location as a source for creative, eco-friendly, progressive communications with story narratives.
Dreams!
A local hyper-media platform that celebrates the women in the area and their expression. Also with stories of their strife. A creative and cohesive space that brings appropriate technology while valueing indispensibility of women in every aspect esp including the culture, food and labor of nurture and care, designed in a way that is replicable and impacts policy (like bio cultural protocols).
We want children and women to have agency and run their own community networks while spearheading their different personal causes. We want them to create their own content, tell their own stories and narratives, and reclaim/create technology that is not alien for them. They can create a safe space to
foster their expression while being independant. We want them to lead activities that help narratives on their knowledge practices and resource-mapping of the area and culture.
Our work over the last few years is to interatively setup a community network called the COWMesh and work with communities to help expand it.
https://open.janastu.org/projects/cowmesh
Our mission is not just to provision Internet access to women and students, but to build local wifi-mesh based services for the community. Papad and ASPi are two such activities that enable hyper-media networking and activity nodes for women:
https://open.janastu.org/projects/papad
https://blog.janastu.org/journeys-dreams-and-everything-in-between/
Parallely we initiated a CrafterSpace with a wish to engage in research and technology development to make sustainable connections between local people, locally available materials and tools, and the required techniques and technology:
https://open.janastu.org/projects/crafts
https://wiki.janastu.org/wiki/CrafterSpace
Some photos of the various activities over the last year:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/4CMErwRNCAnBh9sy5
Some events and activities that bring some of collaborations together are notably the work of resident artists from 0penstudi0 at the dalit village, architects working with local material and skills to promote progressive possibilities for traditional skills, block printing activity with textile designer and the Anthillhacks event.
https://www.instagram.com/crafter_space/
https://open.janastu.org/labs/anthill
We have learnt with experience that slowness is a need for feminist expressions. Community does not have an agency for quick change in the fast paced world of initiatives for entrepreneurship and migration of men in the region. We also learnt that the men in the family desire to keep the women available for labor in their farms and households and marry into hosueholds of with similar socio-moral values. For any change, the community seeks an assertion of trust and safety. In our experience this is brought about through a number of intangible activities such as regular games and creative engagement with children in public spaces and requesting households to open their varandas for computer based learning sessions. The women in the community were invited to cook for their neighborhood as part of sharing sessions which they enjoyed and others replicated. The community radio was run by young girls and when two of them found boys from outside the community the villagers pointed the finger at the facilitators and we had to shut down the community radio until the elders agreed with us that there were many other such cases independent for the radio activity. Now we are comfortable in restarting radio and other internet kiosks for expressive engagement.
The young men have less interest in community activities and skill training! Women give hope. Women are proactive in supporting girls education, but need secondary income. Husbands want them to be daily wage earners as laborers providing security of income.
We are a collective with organisations coming from a number of different areas of work. However, our raison d'etre is to demonstrate viability a community network and possibilities of services for the community as an internet independent space. While Internet access is significant, internet lately has itself been treated as a service and most common utilities being payment and authentication services while for those who can afford devices and internet access, the global social media and shopping sites rule the roost. The massive production capacity of rural areas have come to a stop. In turn this has created a sense of void among the community as their earlier production capacity is now not worth their effort. Our activities are intended to be holistic, especially with the intent of provisioning a sense of updated capacity and wellbeing in rural communities by opening their eyes to the inherent value of local resources and creative engagement, while situating them in the larger feminist dialogs and sustainble development in the face of climate change.
We therefore, define growth as finding a state of equilibrium among these opposing forces where meaningful community networks are seen as replicable and desirable futures.
10.2. SUSTAIN: Please share briefly how are you defining “sustainability” for your organisation/work/activism and what are the needs, concerns and opportunities that you are aware of in your context? {* Answer here, max 250 words}
Our circles of friends and collaborators now come from far and near to be residents, activists, technology experts, creators of learning games, bio-diversity and sustainable practicies, writers and adventurous forest resource mappers, storytellers and nomadic pastoralists… and together we are
and together interested in creating healthy social spaces for women to help care for issues of their communities, esp., the women. Technology we betting on is Web Annotations to help accomodate all.
https://twitter.com/rtk254/status/1528742051461865472
https://hackmd.io/uLswgRQSSx6yV5fpu-IybQ?view
======================
======================
If you're applying for:
1.1. SEED: Have you considered any risks related to your idea, considering the context you are working in? Please share briefly, if any
{* Answer here, max 200 words, bullet points encouraged}
1.2. GROW & SUSTAIN: Can you share with us 3-5 risks that you have identified, considering the context you are working in.
- Risk 1: {* Technology development}
- Who would this affect (e.g. your community, the team, you, the organisation, etc.): {* Affects the team and community USP (we are betting on using mesh network technologies)}
- What are the factors that would affect how likely this risk would happen? {* Router and server failures due to weather or vandalism}
- How might you prepare for it, or try to reduce its likelihood and impact? {* We are prepared with redusndancy and will be regularly backing up data}
- Risk 2: {* Community issues}
- Who would this affect (e.g. your community, the team, you, the organisation, etc.): {* Community}
- What are the factors that would affect how likely this risk would happen? {* Community disapproval or mishaps}
- How might you prepare for it, or try to reduce its likelihood and impact? {* We have already spoken to elders and we plan to continue dialogs with womens group as we engage}
- Risk 3: {* Lack of access to area}
- Who would this affect (e.g. your community, the team, you, the organisation, etc.): {* Like in COVID lockdown}
- What are the factors that would affect how likely this risk would happen? {* pandemic resurfaces}
- How might you prepare for it, or try to reduce its likelihood and impact? {* We have now moved into the area and are part of the community. We expect a large number of activities to continue somewhat}
- Risk 4: {Internet shutdowns}
- Who would this affect (e.g. your community, the team, you, the organisation, etc.): {* Ateam and community}
- What are the factors that would affect how likely this risk would happen? {* Permission to the gateway node can be retracted}
- How might you prepare for it, or try to reduce its likelihood and impact? {* We have alternate possibilities using SIM cards}
- Risk 5: {Answer here}
- Who would this affect (e.g. your community, the team, you, the organisation, etc.): {* Answer here}
- What are the factors that would affect how likely this risk would happen? {* Answer here}
- How might you prepare for it, or try to reduce its likelihood and impact? {* Answer here}
ALL: Other than funding, what kinds of resources might be able to support and strengthen your activism and work (including to address some of the risks above, should it happen)? (delete all that do not apply)*
x 1. Research
x 2. Training and skills building
x 3. Connecting and community building with other activists working on feminism and technology
4. Sharing strategies and practice
x 5. Technical consultations
x 6. Network strengthening or organisational development
x 7. Others (please share) residence
ALL: What kinds of resources might you be able to share on feminism and tech with others doing work in this area? {Answer here, optional, bullet points encouraged}
We are an opensource group and wish that our work is replicable. Our "feminist server" services - contained in the community and all the tech tools and documentation. Our sucess stories and those that are more sensitive in certain contexts. Also we love to exchange team and community members with other organisations when possible.
======================================
======================================
GROW & SUSTAIN: What was the total budget of your organisation, collective, group, initiative in the last year? (delete all that tho do not apply)*
x 3. Between USD 10,000 to USD 50,000
GROW & SUSTAIN: If you were successful in this application, how much would the grant amount contribute to your total budget for 2023? (delete all that tho do not apply)*
x 2. 30-50%
What is the total amount of grant you are requesting for? Grant can be used up to 2 years and is a flexible fund that can be used for general support and/or projects:
{* Answer below, fill in according to the grant type that you're applying for, and delete those that do not apply}
GROW & SUSTAIN: Please share with us your top budget lines that you are thinking of using for this grant (e.g. people, care, tech equipment, project activites etc). We will ask for a full budget if your application is successful.
{* Answer here}
People and care: 25k
Tech equipment: 10k
project activities: 15k
TERMS & CONDITIONS
Yes
–––––––-END OF FORM––––––-
==========================================================================================
NUMUN ==========================================================================================
https://numun.fund
-
Any changes
Be notified of any changes
-
Mention me
Be notified of mention me
-
Unsubscribe
Subscribe