Baltic Sea Conservation Foundation

Last Call: BaltCF supports environmental NGOs in the Baltic Sea Region with a grant for covering the costs of participation in the Frankfurt Spring School on Conservation Project Management. This is a four-week on-site international programme for Master students and early carreer professionals in conservation to learn about planning, managing, funding and communicating environmental projects. The deadline for the application to the programme is 10th November (link below). BaltCF supports NGOs that have successfully placed an employee or volunteer in the programme with up to €3,750 for accomodation, travel, insurance and food expenses. Deadline for the grant application is 20th November. Link to the conditions in the comments.

Conservationists from the Baltic Sea Area - have a look at this funding opportunity!

Our partners from Ghost Diving Germany are on the finishing line of our Baltic Sea Ghost nets project. So far, 7,340 kg of ghost gear have been recovered, of which almost 700 kg have been sent to BRACENET for upcycling. We're happy to see that all of this harmful litter has been removed from the Baltic Sea and look forward to the remainder of the project!

Become a Herring Hero! 🐟 Our friends of Coalition Clean Baltic (CCB) have filed a lawsuit against the illegal herring fishing quotas for 2024, which threaten the massively depleted Baltic herring stocks. BaltCF is happy to co-fund a legal action for the first time, but CCB still needs additional support with this case. If you want to help, you can donate to CCB at https://bit.ly/3YVEoKu. Link to more info in the first comment.

Our report for 2023 just got published! Last year, we closed projects that created 40 km² of new Marine Protected Areas in Finland, rewetted 100 hectares of coastal bog in Lithuania, removed four tons of ghost gear from the southern Baltic Sea, and removed 18 barriers for migratory fish in Poland. Also, we ventured into new territory: We purchased seven hectares of land in the Latvian Lake Engure Nature Park that was slated for the construction of a cottage complex, and we'll have it reintegrated into the park's protected zone. Moreover, we support Coalition Clean Baltic (CCB) with their lawsuit against the illegal fishing quota for Baltic herring in 2024. The link can be found in the comments.

Last week, BaltCF celebrated it's 10th anniversary in Gdansk with a conference on the future of funding for #environmentalconservation in the #balticsea area. Together with reps from different grantmakers and NGOs, we worked on how private funders can improve the way they support environmental projects, with a focus on the Baltic Sea. The group came up with the most effective ways to mess up project funding and then had to realize much of it was already widely in place. We used lego serious play to sculpt all the ways in which the funding system can be improved, and then spontaneously started to create a set of funding principles based on the agile manifesto. BaltCF will use all this input to create a collaboration proposal to other funders in the time to come - and maybe we'll see which of our darlings we should kill. Bureaucracy came up a lot. We also had a round of project pitches where NGOs could present their ideas and projects in need of additional funding - and some may come out of it with additional resources to work with 😊 A big shoutout to Voice of the Ocean Foundation, Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Fundacja MARE, Coalition Clean Baltic (CCB), Latvian Green Movement/Latvijas Zaļā kustība, Race For The Baltic, Ghost Diving Germany, Gaja. Federacja zielonych, Marcis Saklaurs and Uladzimir Zuyeu for working on these ideas with us, and to Dr. Kathleen Schwerdtner Manez, Mila Zarkh and Klara Liebrecht for facilitating the event!

Herzlich willkommen, Dr. Kathleen Schwerdtner Manez! We are super happy to have you! :)

Last call: Two weeks to go before we meet with funders and NGOs to discuss proposals for improving the private funding system for environmental conservation in the Baltic Sea Region! While we're at it, we'll give NGOs the opportunity to pitch projects in need of funding, and also celebrate our 10th anniversary. Registration closes 1st September - use the opportunity to join us in Gdansk and help initiate a better funding future for Baltic Sea protection!

We mostly talk about what wonderful NGOs we can support and what great projects we fund to help the #balticsea. But handling money is a big part of our work, and we like do it wisely. For example, by investing in ver.de Projektgesellschaft AG. We don't use up our assets, but invest them and only spend the profits. It's what endowment funds do. And as our purpose is to use these profits to fund projects that help the #balticsea, we prioritize ecological and social investments. We don't invest in coal power, sweat shops, or deep-sea mining. But many insurance companies do. They don't just insure stuff, they manage incredible amounts of money. In the EEA alone, insurances manage more than €8.5 trillion. That's 8,500,000,000,000 euros - a gigantic amount, more than twice Germany's GDP. What a leverage - you can do a lot of good by investing this money the right way - or a lot of bad by doing it wrong. And while there are a bunch of "green banks", we're still waiting for a "green insurance" to come along and start to stir up this branch of the economy. So we're happy to support ver.de Projektgesellschaft AG in this endeavour - fingers crossed, Marie-Luise Meinhold!

Does your organization fund environmental projects in the Baltic Sea region? Let's meet in Gdańsk for the Future Funding Conference on 10-11 September 2024! Both funders of environmental projects and NGOs executing them are suffering from problems that make the whole system less effective than it could be - lack of information about potential partners, all-nighters of budget tetris, application overkill on both sides, you name it. We believe that if we private grantmakers were connected better, and then funders and NGOs worked together on the crucial issues, we could reduce workload, bureaucracy, and create a better project landscape. Register on https://lnkd.in/eu-nAnjk