The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation provides grants to NGOs working in different areas. But its international funding (for countries outside of the United States) is made only in the areas of Civil Society and Environment. The Civil Society program seeks to strengthen philanthropy and the nonprofit sector as vital vehicles for increasing civic engagement and improving communities and societies while the Environment program is to support the efforts of an engaged citizenry working to create accountable and responsive institutions, sound public policies, and appropriate models of development that protect the diversity and integrity of selected ecosystems in North America and around the world.
For both these programs, the foundation strongly advises NGOs to submit only a Letter of Inquiry (LOI) initially. Interestingly, there is an online system through which any interested organization can submit the LOI for inquiring about grant support. But again before logging in to this system, all applicants have to read through what the foundation funds and what it does not and what are the geographical areas where it provides its grants.
The Letter of Inquiry is available at this link.
It basically seeks information about the applicant, his/her contact information; the organization and its contact information and finally the project information.
Within 6500 characters (around 2 pages), you are required to explain about your project. You can begin an introduction to the project with its goal or vision and then list out the project objectives. Don’t forget to mention the geographical area of your project like district and country to immediately relate it to the foundation’s geographical priorities. You can then mention about the project approach, strategies and activities briefly. At the end, you can give an indication of the budget you are requesting from the foundation. There is no clarity on how much funding an organization can ask for but you can go through the previously funded projects to view the amounts funded at this link.
