In January-May 2012, the Office for a Democratic Belarus in close cooperation with international consortium EUROBELARUS, PACT and Forum Syd organised a training course in the frames of the Clearing House project. The aim of the programme was to select and train experts/consultants capable of providing counseling services for Belarusian CSOs in preparing high-quality project proposals for EU funded programmes.
Initially, it was planned that the training course would be offered for three selected candidates. However, during the project’s implementation it was decided to expand the group by up to six consultants selected through an open call. The team of highly-qualified trainers designed the training course to include a series of three intensive seminars, homework by the participants and individual consultations. The topics of the trainings covered the following:
- Planning and development of projects within the frames of the EU programmes using LFA methodology (January 28-30, 2012);
- Development of professional skills and competencies of an expert/consultant (February 25-27, 2012);
- Implementation opportunities and frames of expert/consultant work in the Clearing House project (March 10-11, 2012).
The whole training course was built on the active learning approach, with the main training dynamics focused on the active work of the participants based on their own experience gained both from previous activities and during the training sessions.
After this stage the team of consultants participated in the training, entitled “Peer Learning: From Project Proposal Development to Monitoring and Evaluation of Project Implementation” organised on April 27-28, 2012 in Kyiv. And finally, in May-early June project consultants fulfilled the training course by participating together with their tutors in the regional training for Belarusian CSOs with more than 120 representatives of CSOs and local authorities attending.
Upon the successful completion of the training course four consultants have been selected to continue their work within the project. More information about them can be found here:
The consultants will be able to provide expert support for Belarusian civil society organisations in preparing quality project proposals. Consultations to the Belarusian civil society organisations for the period of implementation of the Clearing House Project (until July 2013) will be provided by the project consultants free of charge.
Interested CSOs are welcome to submit their requests for counseling services by e-mail directly to the coordination team of the project (chp@democraticbelarus.eu).