Promoting diversity management and inclusion at the workplace, both in the public and private sector

A child protection policy is a mandatory annex for all participants with activities directly involving children (i.e. persons below age of 18). Hence, each organisation involved in the project and having direct (in person or online) contact with minors needs to supply its own child protection policy.

Public entities (e.g. local authorities, ministries,...) can satisfy this obligation by submitting a declaration from their legal representatives stating that the child protection measures of the public entity are in line with the principles and standards described in the Keeping Children Safe Child Safeguarding StandardsPDF (available at: https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2023-10/KCS-CS-Standards-ENG-200218.pdf).

In principle, international organisations are eligible applicants independently of their seat/representation site. However, they must ensure that project activities take place only in the CERV eligible countriesPDF resp. in the JUST eligible countriesPDF while respecting all other eligibility requirements outlined in the Call.

Yes. According to the call document, entities without legal personality under their national law may exceptionally participate, if their representatives have the capacity to undertake legal obligations on their behalf, and offer guarantees for the protection of the EU financial interests equivalent to that offered by legal persons (see Article 197(2)(c) EU Financial Regulation 2018/1046).

At the application stage, such applicant should supply documents proving operational capacity (in line with section Operational capacity of the Call document), notably:

• general profiles (qualifications and experiences) of the staff responsible for managing and implementing the project
• description of the consortium participants
• applicants’ activity reports of last year
• list of previous projects (key projects for the last 4 years).

You can participate even if you have been successful in a past call for proposals, as long as you propose a different action than the one already funded. Please make sure that there is no double funding of similar activities under separate EU grants. Projects must be designed as different actions clearly delineated and separated for each grant (without overlaps). It is strictly prohibited to cumulate funding from the EU budget. Please check section 13 of the call for proposals on "No cumulation of funding/ no double funding" on p. 25.

In addition, please make sure that you have the capacity and resources to deliver the proposed work plan.

Last but not least, we highly recommend you to also go through the Annotated Grant AgreementPDF, which is a user guide aiming to explain to applicants and beneficiaries the EU Model Grant Agreements.

Beneficiaries (BEN) are the legal entities involved in the action that are parties to the grant agreement. As signatories of the grant agreement, they are fully responsible towards the granting authority for implementing the project and for complying with all the obligations stated in the grant agreement.

Affiliated entity (AE) is an organisation that has a link with a beneficiary (in particular a capital or legal link), which is NOT limited to the action or established for the sole purpose of implementing it. Affiliated entities participate in the action with similar rights and obligations as the beneficiaries (obligation to implement action tasks and right to charge costs and claim contributions). Since affiliated entities receive a part of the grant, they must comply with all the call conditions and be validated (just like beneficiaries).

Associated partners (AP) are the entities, which participate in the action, but without the right to charge costs or claim contributions. Since they participate without funding, they do not need to be validated.

Attention! Affiliated entities and Associated partners are NOT considered as beneficiaries, because they do not sign a grant agreement. Therefore, they do not count towards the minimum eligibility criteria for consortium composition (if any).

No, there is no binding template under the CERV and the JUST programmes for the written consortium agreement. However, once the proposal is selected for funding, members of consortia must conclude a written consortium agreement.

For more details concerning its content, please consult CERV Model Grant AgreementPDF (p.28-29), CERV Lump Sum Model Grant AgreementPDF (p. 21) resp. JUST LS Model Grant AgreementPDF (p.21) and Annotated Grant AgreementPDF(article 7).

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.

Organisations that are not in the list of participating countries can participate as associated partners but not as affiliated entities.

Associated partners participate in the action, but without the right to charge costs or claim contributions. Since they participate without funding, they do not need to be validated.

Affiliated entities are organisations that have a link with a beneficiary (in particular a capital or legal link), which is NOT limited to the action or established for the sole purpose of implementing it. Affiliated entities participate in the action with similar rights and obligations as the beneficiaries (obligation to implement action tasks and right to charge costs and claim contributions). Since affiliated entities receive a part of the grant, they must comply with all the call conditions and be validated (just like beneficiaries).

The alert is a non-blocking warning.

Please make sure that your consortium is in line with the consortium composition as described in the call document and ignore the warning if it is not applicable to you.

We confirm that consortium coordinator and partners can be either

• based in the same eligible country (national project), or
• come from different eligible countries (transnational project)

Applicants are asked NOT to delete any instructions in the document or any formal sections of the application. Formatting rules should be abided (i.e., Arial 9 points as minimum font size to fill-up the application). Any alterations of the application template must be avoided, to prevent the risk of inadmissibility of the application.

For priorities 1, 2.1, 3.1 and 5, a public or private non-profit university can be project coordinator.

To determine whether a private university can be considered non-profit, we kindly refer you to the Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity AssessmentPDF.

As mentioned on page 6 in the call document section 0. Introduction:

• Each project application under the call must address only one of the call topics.
• Furthermore, the same application can only be submitted to one call and one topic.
• Applicants cannot submit more than one proposal as coordinator under this call.

It is possible for one organisation to be coordinator for one proposal and participant in another proposal. However, in that case, organisations are asked to be attentive to any possible duplication issues that might arise and to ensure that they have sufficient operational and financial capacity to implement both projects in case they are both selected for funding.

Applicants (members of consortia) must provide CVs of core project team as an obligatory annex. CVs should be merged into one document in a PDF format. In case key personnel has not yet been recruited, job description should be provided instead.

Yes, even only one of the consortium beneficiaries / partners can assume the full co-financing of 10% of the total eligible costs of the project.

Yes, Work Package 1 (WP1) should be by default ‘Project management and coordination’ for the overall overseeing of the project.

Please read carefully the application template, section 4.2 Work packages, activities, resources and timing.

Projects should normally have a minimum of 2 work packages. WP1 should cover the management and coordination activities (meetings, coordination, project monitoring and evaluation, financial management, progress reports, etc) and all the activities which are cross-cutting and therefore difficult to assign to another specific work package (do not try splitting these activities across different work packages). WP2 and further WPs should be used for the other project activities. You can create as many work packages as needed by copying WP1.

In the detailed budget table, you will add all work packages as designed in Part B, starting from WP1 ‘Project management and coordination’.

Please note that the costs for WP1 should not be higher than 10% of total costs, since under lump sum funding there is no reporting of costs, no financial statements at the end and no need to keep costs-supporting documentation (no timesheets, no invoices, no proofs of payments). Therefore, the costs linked to project coordination are expected to be limited.

The EUR 750,000 refers to the requested grant amount, therefore, the total cost of the project for which the intervention of the EU is requested should not exceed about EUR 830,000.

Under lump sum projects the co-financing is defined at budget stage. The detailed budget table is filled in at costs level and the co-financing is calculated in line with the co-financing rate that has been filled in in the cover page of the detailed budget table. If any doubts may rise about co-financing capacities, additional explanation can be provided in the proposal.

There are two types of Lump Sum payment, the CERV-2025-EQUAL call is 'Lump Sum Type II'. The other type of lump sum is the 'Lump Sum Type I', which is mentioned in the call document as 'prefixed Lump Sum Grants'.

As a consequence, the section '2.6. Cost effectiveness and financial management' needs to be completed for this call.

The table ' Estimated budget — Resources' and the section on 'staff effort' do not need to be completed for this call, please leave the table and corresponding sections empty as the information should be completed in the detailed budget table. If you have subcontracting, the section on subcontracting does need to be completed.

In kind contributions are not eligible, the only cost categories that are eligible are the ones listed in the detailed budget table and the costs of the action must be supported by the applicants.

Applicants that encounter difficulties in providing the co-financing may charge volunteer costs in line with Commission Decision C(2019) 2646 finalPDF.

We kindly refer you to the following sources of information:

• The call document section 10 on the legal and financial set-up of the grant agreements (page 27), where you will find more information on the budget categories and cost eligibility rules.

• the Annotated Grant AgreementPDF, which is a user guide aiming to explain to applicants and beneficiaries the EU Model Grant Agreements.

• The information provided during the online info session

It is up to the consortium to decide on the distribution of the lump sums per partner organisation. One lump sum can be split between several partners (e.g. % share) or can be attributed only to one organisation. It is mandatory that the total budget per partner included in the Part A is equal to the total budget in the calculator sheet.

NO. You can submit your proposal and annexes in any official EU language (project abstract/summary should however always be in English). For reasons of efficiency, we strongly advise you to use English for the main part of the application (Part B).

There is no template format for the CVs. Hence, applicants may use Europass CV or any other CV format.

We encourage applicants to submit CVs, as all other annexes in English. Nevertheless, they can be submitted also in any EU official language.

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)

NO. The maximum page limit for proposal (Part B) set in the Call document ensures equal treatment of all applicants.

All excess pages detected by the system will be blanked. Therefore, the applicants need to make sure to respect this limitation before converting the application Part B document into a PDF and uploading it via the Submission wizard.

NO. Applicants are asked NOT to delete any instructions in the document or any formal sections of the application. Formatting rules should be abided (i.e., Arial 9 points as minimum font size to fill-up the application). Any alterations of the application template must be avoided, to prevent the risk of inadmissibility of the application.

The list of previous projects (template available at the end of part B) should include all EU-funded projects from the last four years. You may also include other projects that demonstrate your operational capacity, but be sure to clearly distinguish between EU-funded and nationally funded projects.

Please note that DG Justice revised its evaluation methodology and all criteria (relevance, quality and impact) have been gender mainstreamed. Thus, your attention to gender aspects has a positive impact on the score you receive in the evaluation. Proposals that integrate a gender perspective are also considered as of higher quality and we encourage you to take gender differences into account when drafting every section of your proposal (needs assessment, target group, risks, impact, communication, etc…).

The KPI tool allows the Commission to systematically and reliably collect data related to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the CERV and Justice programmes.

The previously used “Part C (KPI)” form has been recently replaced by the “KPI tool”. The KPI tool is designed to collect data on the number of persons (male/female/non-binary) participating as attendees to – or that are reached by – a specific activity.

The same KPI tool is used throughout the whole project lifecycle, starting from the stage of proposal submission (SEP) and, if selected, continuing with grant agreement preparation (GAP) and reporting stages (REPA).

Data is preloaded from SEP (submission) to GAP (grant preparation) and from GAP to REPA (reporting); project coordinators can update data from estimates (at application stage) to actual data (at reporting).

When preparing their application, applicants indicate two types of information (i.e. two fields):

1.The type of project.

2.The indicators on the number of persons reached by 3 main types of activities.

1. First field “Type of project” (main activity)

The projects funded under the CERV and the Justice programmes usually include different types of activities. To contribute to the Commission own reporting duties, applicants are requested to classify their project according to its main set of activities (i.e. the main mean to reach the objective). Even if several types of activities will be implemented, applicants must choose one of the five “labels” amongst the given options: mutual learning and exchange of good practices, training, ICT tools, awareness-raising information and dissemination, analytical activities. Only one choice is allowed. This does not change the nature of the project and does not prevent to implement a mix of activities, but it allows for an easier Commission reporting.

2. Second field “Output, result and impact indicators”

This second field aims at recording the number of persons participating in or reached by three types of activities: training, awareness-raising and mutual learning.

A project can foresee different types of activities under the main one. For instance, an analytical project could include an expert workshop (mutual learning) and an information event (awareness-raising). Therefore, while labelled as “analytical” as type of project in the first field, this second field should be filled in for each type of event targeting participants through training, awareness-raising or mutual learning, which can be chosen independently of the choice made for the type of project. The related activity field can be left empty (i.e. value = 0) only if no such activity is planned or takes place within the framework of the project.

The number of persons by type of activity is cumulative, and it includes also the activities implemented by third parties (i.e. for projects with regranting).

At application stage, these numbers are based on estimates; if the project is selected and awarded a grant, actual data is provided at reporting stage.

Additional definitions:

Training:

Training activities may be classroom training or e-learning courses as well as staff exchanges, study visits, workshops and seminars.

The number of persons reached is the number of trainees who have registered to the training module.

Persons who participate in the preparation of the training (e.g. in the needs assessments or research activity) are not considered as trainees.

Persons who participate in the follow-up of the training (e.g. dissemination activities, conference, etc.) are not considered as trainees.

A person who participates in more than 1 training activities is counted as many times as this person participated in different training activities.

Mutual learning and exchange of good practices:

Mutual learning and exchanges of good practices activities may be meetings, workshops, seminars, webinars, online platforms, expert groups, peer-learning, networking, study visits and all other activities that provide the opportunity to identify and learn from good practices in other Member States, other regions or in other sector of activities.

The number of persons reached is the number of men, women and non-binary individuals directly taking part in the activities.

Persons who participate in the dissemination of the mutual learning activity (e.g. press conferences, information folder receivers, etc.) or people touched by media communication activities (e.g. radio broadcast) are not considered as directly taking part in the mutual learning activity.

A person who participates in more than 1 mutual learning activities is counted as many times as this person participated in different mutual learning activities.

Participants to focus groups fall under this category.

Awareness-raising:

Awareness raising, information and dissemination activities are conferences, press conferences, media campaigns (including online), publications and all activities aimed at raising awareness, informing and promoting the debate in the areas of the programme.

The number of persons reached is the number of men, women and non-binary individuals touched [once or several times by one or several means] by these activities.

There is no binding template for a Child protection policy (CPP), since situation of each organisation is unique. However, it must be covering the four areas (policy, people, procedures, accountability) described in the Keeping Children Safe Child Safeguarding StandardsPDF. Moreover, the CPP must be available online and transparent to everyone who comes in contact with the organisation. It must include clear information about the recruitment of staff (including trainees and volunteers) and include background checks (vetting). It must also include clear procedures and rules to staff, including reporting rules, and continuous training.

The Eurochild Child Protection PolicyPDF is a suitable example.

The financial capacity check is done only in case a proposal is selected for funding. It is normally performed for all coordinators with exception of public bodies (entities established as public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) and international organisations. If needed, it may also be done for affiliated entities. Before the grant agreement preparation, the applicants will be approached by the Commission with the list of documents to supply.

For more information consult Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity AssessmentPDF, which provides guiding principles concerning financial capacity check in its part IV. RULES ON FINANCIAL CAPACITY ASSESSMENT (pp. 21-26).

The Lead Partner/Coordinator must submit the list of key previous projects implemented in the last 4 years. For partner organisations, this is recommended.

As mentioned on page 13 of the Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity AssessmentPDF, an international organisation means an intergovernmental organisation (other than the EU) established under international public law, including specialised entities — with or without legal personality — set up by international organisations.

This status is systematically checked against supporting documents and validated by the Central Validation Service.

A public body means an entity established as a public body by national law, or an international organisation, this is mentioned on page 9 of the Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity AssessmentPDFwhich we strongly recommend you consult for further details.

The evaluation methodology (evaluation criteria for relevance, quality and impact) is designed to reflect “Rights of the child/Child protection policies” dimension. Consequently, (lack of) attention to rights of a child/child protection policies dimension may have an impact on the score a proposal receives in the evaluation.

Notably, if a project has a direct or indirect impact on children and their rights, the project should address children as rights holders and should ensure their participation in the design and implementation of the project.

In the calls for proposals published under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) Programme, the annual activity report is not needed for public bodies, which also includes public universities.

The Annual Activity Report (AAR) is a document describing the activities of the Applicant in the year preceding the year of application (or the last year available).

There is no binding template for AAR and it is admissible in any EU language.

Please note that AAR is not a financial statement!