CARTAE, support routes for our partners

In order to strengthen the impact and transformative capacities of our partners, we are developing a committed and ambitious support program to complement our subsidies. With the Cartae program, we are experimenting with a comprehensive offer of support for the consolidation or development of project leaders. This extra-financial support is yet another way in which we can work together to build a more ecological, inclusive and fulfilling society.

Strengthening our structural support

In its main areas of intervention, which are Sustainable Food and Citizen Art, our foundation supports with rigor and benevolence those who, through their ideas, knowledge and experience, move our society forward. Their projects are at the heart of our missions, as explained by Alice Callegarin Demangeat, project manager, on behalf of all the teams involved on a daily basis. “With nearly €109 million distributed through more than 1,500 grants, we have developed close and trusting relationships with our partners over the past 12 years. These long-term links allow us to better understand their situation and their needs. Thus , we support them with extra-financial support (training, services, networking, studies, etc.) so that they can develop, scale up and consolidate their operations. “We are increasingly in a partnership logic of dialogue, and not just in a traditional relationship between donor and project leader.”

Today, we are structuring this offer under the name Cartae, an individual and collective support system, operational in Spain and gradually implemented in France. It is a question of offering solutions to our partners to develop in an agile way, to best meet their expectations and those of their ecosystem. Because they are the ones who build the sustainable and just society we all aspire to.

An offer adapted to everyone

Cartae, a portmanteau word composed of “map” and the Latin term “charta” meaning “paper” or “letter”, symbolises the diversity of the paths and developments that the projects are taking and will take all the more thanks to this support proposal. This map also embodies the interconnections that this learning network represents. The support is:

• flexible : Cartæ begins with a phase of diagnosis and identification of a need, either by the project leaders themselves, or by the Foundation’s team or the project instructor. Adapted and adaptable, the itinerary takes into account the very essence of the project while integrating an external perspective beneficial to its strengthening.
• co-constructed: The support path is developed jointly by the project leaders and the Foundation. This course will have to determine the needs in terms of advice and/or training, the time needed for support as well as the provider(s) best suited to these needs and the methods of action.
• tailor-made: Cartae offers group training sessions covering cross-cutting topics but also more specialized in the fields of Sustainable Food and Citizen Art. A personalized format can also be offered with a short-term one-off service (e.g. redesign of a website) or a longer-term consultation (e.g. change of scale of a project).

A constellation of possibilities

This free offer is in addition to the subsidies awarded. It is therefore exclusively intended for the structures that we support within the framework of our programmes.

In keeping with the spirit in which Cartæ was conceived, the themes that make up the device form a constellation. At its centre, a common “planet”, with a useful offer for all types of structures:

• Legal and financial advice
• Governance
• The Theory of Change
• the definition of the entity’s objectives and actions
• Impact assessment

From the heart of this constellation emanate four thematic “planets”:

• external relations (issues of communication, institutional relations and awareness-raising among decision-makers);
• the economic model (long-term financial viability, hybridization of models, change of scale, diversification of resources);
• the resilience of organizations in the face of digital transformation and the socio-ecological transition;
• and finally, a learning community contributing to the development of skills and the networking of actors, particularly in our two main themes.

We make sure to work with a network of partners specialized in each theme, sharing the values of the Foundation.

Examples of support

Socially engaged art

As part of the 2022 Mediations and Cultural Democracy call for projects, the pre-selected candidates were able to participate in a training course on the issue of cultural rights, the identification of the vocabulary used in the project and the place of each actor in the project ecosystem. 2 other days are planned between now and the end of the year, for the projects that will be selected, around the conditions of real democratic participation and local citizen dynamics.

Sustainable food

Since 2019, we have been calling on the Ecti association, which brings together 2000 retired volunteers, to advise and support economic and social actors in the success of their projects. In particular, they worked with 16 Nourish the Future laureates to carry out a variety of missions throughout France: agronomic technical support for small-scale Caribbean agriculture, creation of a SCIC, legal strategy in terms of leases, identification of local partners, methodology for an environmental impact study, economic modelling, etc.