Submit Your Ideas for OpenIDEO’s BridgeBuilder Challenge 2019: People on the Move

OpenIDEO, in partnership with GHR Foundation, is currently inviting eligible organizations for its 2019 BridgeBuilder Challenge to address urgent and emergent needs of a global population directly impacted by a lack of peace, prosperity, and sound environmental conditions—people on the move.

BridgeBuilder invests in building and repairing unique bridges between people, organizations, issues, and beliefs to promote meaningful engagement and sustainable, community-led change. Over the past two years, the Challenge has sourced hundreds of radical new approaches to solve pressing global issues at the intersections of peace, prosperity, and planet.

Opportunity Areas

Opportunity Areas are specific calls to action that guide the BridgeBuilder community. They serve as provocations that are intentionally aligned with Challenge topic and are ripe for innovation.

• The Full Human Journey
• Beyond Survival to Potential
• Equipping Diverse Communities

Prize Information

Selected Top Ideas will:

• Receive a share of $1 million in seed funding from GHR Foundation.
• Join a BridgeBuilder cohort of innovative organizations working to address urgent needs.
• Take part in a kick-off workshop, during which they will meet other social innovators and further design and build their approaches with tools and expertise from GHR Foundation and OpenIDEO.
• Receive partnership support from GHR Foundation, potential connection to other funder networks, and media exposure.

BridgeBuilder Principles

A different kind of solution requires a new way of working, both within communities of focus and with each other. BridgeBuilder Principles should guide ideas to be designed not for but with communities of focus, just as they will guide the selection process.

• Engagement Principles
  • Meet people where they are. Geographically, socially, emotionally, culturally, and otherwise.
  • Build relationships. Build trusting relationships characterized by respect and compassion.
  • Listen deeply. Listen with humility. Treat peoples’ stories with dignity and respect. Recognize and honor lived experience as expertise.
  • Collaboratively learn and adapt. Respond to changing contexts and emergent learning through reflection, co-creation, and co-implementation with individuals, partners, and communities.
  • Address Urgent Needs. Build and repair bridges between people, issues, and beliefs that promote meaningful engagement and greater social cohesion.
• Design Principles
  • Root Solutions in Community. Deeply root solutions in the context, cultures, knowledge, wisdom, needs, and aspirations of partner communities.
  • Promote Equitable and Just Systems. Shift power structures, altering narratives and moving the world in a more equitable and just direction.
  • Promote and Protect Human Dignity. Go beyond meeting basic needs. Help people meet the needs of joy, hope, and dignity.

Criteria

Ideas are invited from individuals and teams currently or previously experiencing displacement as well as registered nonprofit, civil society, community-based, and for-profit organizations working anywhere in the world. If applicants are an individual or team without a registered organization, applicants are encouraged to post their idea early so the community management team can work to identify potential partners within the BridgeBuilder community.

• Actionable and tangible: Idea must be actionable and build tangible results in the community of focus, rather than research, convenings, policy development, or advocacy.
• Within scope: Idea must be implemented within a 36-month timeline and within a budget up to US $200,000.‍
• Representative: Idea must show evidence that the voice and perspective of a person currently or previously experiencing displacement is part of the ideation, process, and project.

How to Apply

Interested applicants should submit their ideas online via the given website.

For more information, please visit 2019 BridgeBuilder Challenge.