A Staying Alive Foundation grant comes with a financial grant of up to $12,000 per year, Staying Alive materials (including MTV Staying Alive programming and teaching kits), a small fund to buy technical media equipment, a local mentor, a personal grant manager as well as training and development.
The SAF supports youth-led organisations (led by young people between the ages of 15 and 27) that work in the field of HIV prevention. If you apply as an informal group (not registered as an NGO), you should have the support of an associate organisation as we will not deposit funds into an individual’s account.
We seek to support organisations that are start-ups and do not have much support, financial or otherwise. We are much more likely to fund an organisation that has little or no existing funding to date, rather than those who already have several funders on board.
The application process works in two stages. The first stage is a short online form that you should fill in and send back to the Staying Alive Foundation. We will aim to get back to you within two weeks of receiving the form to let you know whether you have been accepted to the second stage. The second stage involves filling in a longer form with more details about your organisation and the project for which you are asking funding.
You can make as many applications as you want. However, you can only make one application per organisation, per funding round. The Staying Alive Foundation receives many more applications than it can fund and has strict criteria for selection.
Our grants are given out on a one-year basis to new grants, but we encourage our grantees to reapply before the end of their original grant for a grant that lasts up to 3 years. We only fund organisations for a maximum of 4 years. Please note that while we do encourage re-application, it is not guaranteed that the Foundation will renew every grant.
Our grants are given out on a one-year basis to new grants, but we encourage our grantees to reapply before the end of their original grant for a grant that lasts up to 3 years. We only fund organisations for a maximum of 4 years. Please note that while we do encourage re-application, it is not guaranteed that the Foundation will renew every grant.
We can support the purchase of equipment if it is an essential part of the project that you propose. However, please ensure that the capital costs make up a relatively small portion of your budget.
You can include justifiable overhead costs in your overall budget; however, we will not always consider projects where the overhead costs are more than 25% of the total budget.
No. The application process and forms have been designed to generate information that is required by the Staying Alive Foundation.
We will send you an email to confirm that we have received your form. If you get through to the second round of our application process, you will receive another email including a unique reference number. Please note that this can sometimes take up to two weeks due to the amount of applications we receive.
All applicants will be informed by 30 November and we will announce the winners on 1 December 2012. If your application is successful, we will send you a Letter of Agreement (LOA) that you will have to fill in and sign, agreeing to the Foundation’s terms and conditions.
Your grant will be paid into your account in two instalments. The first instalment (50% of the overall annual grant) will be made as soon as we receive your signed Letter of Agreement. The second instalment is paid six months after the first, and only released upon receipt of a satisfactory mid-term report.
You will be required to submit two reports per year, one after six months and one at the end of the project. Your SAF Grant Manager will be able to discuss the requirements with you in detail, once you have been approved for a grant.
We generally put out requests for proposals once a year in July for grants that are awarded in December.
You can hear about these in advance if you send an email to:
foundation@stayingalivefoundation.org with the subject: ‘Sign up for SAF mailing list’.
Once you receive a grant, we will assign you a personal Grant Manager. This person will be your point of communication with the Staying Alive Foundation. She or he will be in contact with you very regularly by phone and email to give you advice and answer any of your questions. In addition, you are expected to give regular updates of your activities to your Grant Manager.