Call for proposals for large grants No. 4/SPLOT/GD/2026

Intermediaries must ensure that their grantees do not breach Union values, or promote values or engage into activities contradictory to Union values. In addition, they must require a signed declaration of honour from the re-granted CSOs to this effect, which should state that breaches will make them liable to exclusion, administrative sanctions or cancellation of funding. Applicants should describe how their evaluation procedures will incorporate relevant expertise to select only CSOs defending Union values, and how their management and control system will integrate means to prevent, detect, mitigate, report on and remedy any reputational risk linked to the third party CSOs' activities.

The EU Survey on Justice, Rights and Values is part of the performance monitoring framework put in place by DG JUST to collect monitoring data and results to ensure the sound management of its funding programmes, public accountability and transparency. It will aim at measuring the quality of the training, mutual learning and awareness-raising events funded under the call for proposals.

Each beneficiary will be requested to ask the attendees of the events organised in the framework of his project to participate in the EU Survey. Beneficiaries will have access to the results and will be able to use them for their project evaluation.

DG JUST will aggregate the results of all the projects financed under the Justice and CERV programmes.

The survey is made of two parts:

• the first one is a usual satisfaction questionnaire aiming at measuring the quality and the impacts of the event organised;
• the second one intends to gather attendees’ perception of the values promoted by the Justice and CERV programmes and measure attendees’ awareness of the different instruments used to promote and protect rights and values.

The following personal data is collected if the respondent agrees:

• name and surname, gender, age category and e-mail address of the respondent,
• the name type and of the organisation on whose behalf the respondent is contributing, and the country of establishment

Protection of personal data is ensured all along the process. The respondent can refuse to give these data but just give his/her answer to the question in an anonymised way.

If the proposal is submitted by a consortium, the consortium must comply with the eligibility criteria set out in section 6 of the call for proposals. The recent proven experience in implementing CSOs capacity building activities, and in awarding and managing grants to CSOs, can be fulfilled either by one single member of the consortium or by different members of that consortium, responsible for capacity building or awarding and managing financial support to third parties.

The call does not define a fixed percentage between these categories. Both financial support to third parties and capacity building are considered essential to achieve the objective of this call for proposals and must be reflected appropriately in the budget distribution. Moreover, financial support to third parties should represent a significant part of the project’s budget. The applicant should decide on the budget allocated to different types of activities based on the objectives of their proposal, on the analysis of the CSO sector in the country(ies) and region(s) concerned and of the needs of targeted CSOs.

All grants require a co-financing of the declared eligible costs. The project costs will be reimbursed at the funding rate fixed in the grant agreement (90%). In line with the EC Financial Regulation (Article 190), the remaining 10% may be provided in different ways, for example in the form of beneficiaries' own resources, income generated by the action, financial or in-kind contributions (volunteers' work may comprise up to 50% of the co-financing).

To gender mainstream your proposal, please consider the guiding questions below to integrate a gender perspective into your project:

• Did I conduct a gender equality analysis to assess my project’s design, implementation and impact?
• Did I take into account gender aspects in my needs assessment?
• Will the data and indicators I collect and create be disaggregated by sex?
• Did I include in my proposal a commitment to advance gender equality?
• Did I include in my proposal a commitment to monitor and report on the gender equality results achieved by the project in the evaluation phase?
• Do I plan to create gender-specific indicators to measure the project’s gender equality objectives?

Questions 1-5 are considered basic elements of a gender-mainstreamed proposal. Question 6, is designed for projects, which put gender equality at their core.

Additional guidance can be found on: What is Gender mainstreaming | EIGE (europa.eu) and Gender analysis | EIGE (europa.eu)

Applicants may submit more than one proposal for different projects under the same call (and be awarded a funding for them). Organisations may participate in several proposals. But, if there are several proposals for very similar projects, only one application will be accepted and evaluated; the applicants will be asked to withdraw one of them (or it will be rejected).

The project proposal submitted by the intermediary does not need to cover all the CERV fields in an exhaustive way. However, the project should contribute to creating a supportive environment for CSOs that are engaged in the promotion and protection of Union values in full compliance with the values and rights enshrined in the Treaties and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.

Therefore, the call(s) for proposals launched by the intermediary should not focus on one area or only a few areas but should aim at promoting an overarching culture of fundamental rights, democracy and rule of law. This/ese call(s) for proposals will address, in complementarity with capacity building activities, the main challenges and needs of the CSOs active in promoting and protecting Union values in the country(ies) covered.

Under this call, intermediaries should give the priority to reach out to grassroot, small, remote and rural based CSOs, which tend to have a more limited capacity and less funding sources. Before submitting a proposal, applicants must carry out an analysis of the CSO sector in the country(ies) and region(s) they target. They must also identify the key challenges CSOs are facing there, and clearly define their needs based on a robust needs assessment. In the application, applicants must then present a high quality overview of their findings, as well as a strategy to reach out to the targeted CSOs. These elements are to be taken into account when defining the activities for the third party CSOs in terms of capacity building and re-granting. Please note that the list of activities implemented by the third parties presented in the call is not exhaustive. Other relevant and innovative activities may be considered.

In their proposal, applicants must provide an estimated budget for the planned work. After selection and grant agreement signature, beneficiaries will normally receive a pre-financing payment of 40% of the maximum grant amount to start working on the project. Further payment(s) will be made during implementation and be linked to annual periodic reports.

Intermediaries must ensure transparency through adequate publication of their calls for proposals, and prevent conflicts of interest throughout the entire award procedure for financial support to third party CSOs (e.g. use of external experts to evaluate proposals, composition of the selection/evaluation committee, etc.). In their application they should describe a system that will be put in place for preventing, detecting, mitigating, reporting on and remedying suspected or actual cases of conflict of interest in the selection procedures. The approach to evaluate and select third party CSOs will be assessed under the award criterion 'Quality'.

Moreover, please note that the third parties are neither affiliated entity(ies) (of the intermediary) nor associated partners, nor contractors; and beneficiaries (i.e. intermediaries) are not eligible to apply to calls for third parties issued by other beneficiaries under this call.

Projects under this call can either be transnational or national. Proposals must be submitted by a consortium of at least 1 applicant which means that one single applicant can submit a proposal or several applicants can do so by forming a consortium. Applicants do not need to cover more than one country, but they may do so if they are able to provide a thorough assessment of the civil society organisations' (CSOs) landscape in the country(ies) covered, the challenges they face and their needs.

The purpose of this call for proposals is to select and support a limited number of intermediaries in EU Member States, capable of building the capacities of a large number of CSOs active at local, regional and/or national level in the fields covered by the CERV programme.

The eligibility conditions set out in the call require, among others, that the applicant or the consortium fulfils all of the following:

• have recent proven experience of at least 3 years in implementing CSO capacity building activities;
• have recent proven experience in awarding and managing grants to CSOs.

If the proposal is submitted by a consortium, the consortium must fulfil both conditions listed above. This means that these conditions can be fulfilled either by one single member of the consortium or by different members of that consortium, responsible for capacity building or awarding and managing financial support to third parties.

In order to demonstrate such experience, applicants should detail which activities they carried out in this regard; for how long; under which funding programme/national scheme; and for what target group(s). This experience may have been acquired under EU programmes or other programmes/schemes. Applicants should substantiate the transferability of such experience to activities planned under this call.

This information should be provided in the Application Form (Part B) and in the mandatory annexes: "Activity reports of last year" and "List of previous" (if any), which refers to EU funded projects or other projects relevant to their application (e.g. EEA and Norway grants).