In order to be considered for a grant, your project needs to be aligned with the aims and desired outcomes described below.

When completing your application form, you will need to specify how your project meets these aims & outcomes and what types of projects it matches most closely from the lists below. When identifying project types, choose a section number and combine it with a list item identifier (e.g 2c, 3e).

Our aims

Emergence Foundation wishes to support individuals and organisations who are inspired by a depth of purpose to improve the quality of life of individuals, enhance communities and benefit the environment through educational projects which affect a shift in consciousness or perspective that provides a force for positive change in the world.

All projects must be educational in nature and for public benefit. You can learn more about our aims on our purpose page.

As an applicant you will need to show how your project fits with these aims.

Desired Outcomes

Emergence Foundation intends their funding to:

  1. Enhance beneficiaries’ inner enrichment, sense of meaning and purpose in life: catalysing conscious moral and spiritual development through a heartfelt connection to ‘other(s)’, nature, life, and a motivation to contribute positively to the future
  2. Create/inspire in beneficiaries the qualities of courage, inner strength and a commitment to improving the lives of others
  3. Enable beneficiaries to discover a more holistic, integrated relationship to life; to collaborate with others in order to counter the fragmentation, alienation and partisan attitudes so prevalent
  4. Address the current moral, spiritual, cultural, and/or environmental crises that endanger humanity and all of life, by developing practical, measurable, holistic solutions
  5. To promote diversity and inclusion. This could be in any area including race, ethnicity, disability, gender, LGBTQ+, age, social disadvantage, religion or belief

As an applicant you will need to say which of these outcomes you will be delivering – at least one – and how.

Types of Projects we Support

Emergence Foundtion wishes to support projects that:

1. aim to improve individuals’ quality of life

Examples of the qualities of life we are interested in:

  1. Their sense of meaning and purpose
  2. Their self–awareness and empathy
  3. Their confidence and empowerment
  4. Their vision and creativity
  5. Their moral strength and integrity
  6. Their agency and responsibility

2. develop individuals’ specific knowledge and skills

Examples of the knowledge and skills we are interested in:

  • enquiry
  • meditation
  • mindfulness
  • contextual thinking
  • contemplation
  • dialogue

Examples of capacities we are interested in:

  1. independent thinking: the willingness to radically question, maintain an open mind, engage in sustained enquiry
  2. contextual awareness: seeing situations within a larger context
  3. holistic thinking: embracing complexity, systems and process thinking; an understanding of the principal and implications of unity and interconnectedness in relation to diversity
  4. altruistic sensibilities: developing empathy and mutual respect as a basis for creative thinking and/or solutions beyond self-interest
  5. flexibility, creative responsiveness: letting go of fixed positions, adapting to changing circumstances
  6. emergent dialogue: radical listening, developmental thinking, non-linear solutions
  7. imagination and visionary thinking
  8. creative agency: following through and actualising one’s ideas/vision
  9. collaborative teamwork

3. address existential issues

Examples of the issues we are interested in:

  1. alienation
  2. disempowerment
  3. lack of meaning
  4. rootlessness

4. facilitate self-actualisation and empowerment

Examples of the benefits we are interested in:

  1. the self-actualisation of an individual’s gifts and capacities to contribute to society
  2. healing, reconciliation and/or mental health with an emphasis on self-authorship, empowerment and responsibility

5. uplift and develop culture

Examples of the capacities for coherence we are interested in:

  1. inclusivity: seeking unity within diversity e.g. transcending division and/or creating bridges through finding common ground, shared humanity and/or a higher common objective
  2. empathy: proactive ways of understanding and working with difference, reducing the tendency toward ‘otheration’ or objectification; caring and understanding the needs of the whole
  3. understanding and applying the principles and values intrinsic to collaboration i.e. prioritising and working towards higher objectives
  4. constructive questioning and critical thinking with regard to contemporary human experience and culture
  5. expanding perspectives and new ways of thinking
  6. cultivating egalitarianism – recognition of and respect for the fundamental equality of all people
  7. global, holistic awareness including but not limited to 1) a deep time cosmic perspective and 2) an understanding of the relationship between past and present, historically

6. develop communities, groups, or effective teams

Examples of the skills we are interested in:

  1. dialogue skills: facilitating the art of radical listening – awareness of connecting threads and capacity to seek, identify and cultivate shared ground between disparate positions (e.g. communal, political, social)
  2. practices and programmes designed to facilitate trust/openness/collective action
  3. training in the principles of individual and collective development
  4. understanding key elements in creating conditions for change and growth

7. address the environmental crisis

Examples of specific initiatives we are interested in:

  1. educational initiatives on sustainability, including the recognition of our moral responsibility as human beings
  2. non-profit projects supporting environmental awareness and innovative solutions
  3. programmes that support multicultural practices and ways of thinking relevant to current issues i.e. planetary degradation, social fragmentation, individual alienation