East East Program Partnership Across Borders

The East East Program: Partnership Beyond Borders supports people and ideas to transcend national borders and collaborate in creating and strengthening conditions of open society beyond borders. Communication is the essence of the East East Program: Partnership Beyond Borders. The program supports openness, dialogue and neutral space for diverse views. Initiatives supported by the program seek to discover and inspire new visions, energy and creativity to strengthen conditions of open society beyond borders. Initiatives supported in the East East Program involve two or more countries.

The Program is a resource which responds to needs from people in society most intensively in contact with local conditions, and takes a long-term perspective in empowering people to work beyond borders toward common goals of open society.

Program Objectives

• to expand people’s vision for innovation through exposure to ideas, information and knowledge and to support practical actions based on knowledge networking; and,
• to consolidate the work of a critical mass of people promoting an open society agenda as a trans-national force for advocacy, impact, positive change and policy dialogue on issues relevant to the OSI mission

Civil society institutions, non-governmental organizations and informal associations may use the resources of the program

• to exchange experiences, best practices, lessons learned and models of development
• to collaborate in finding innovative solutions to trans-national challenges
• to build and/or strengthen local capacity, resources and expertise
• to analyze comparative trends in social, economic and political development
• to identify alternative approaches in overcoming stereotypes, prejudice, isolation, exclusion
• to strengthen coalitions/alliances in influencing public policies and public policy dialogue
• to catalyze expertise, innovation and advocacy to affect positive change

Priority is given to long-term initiatives with a clear vision and realistic potential for impact to affect change. The program addresses challenges facing contemporary societies globally, including but not limited to

• empowerment, mobility and diversity of civil society
• disadvantaged and marginalized sectors of society
• multicultural acceptance, diversity and interaction
• impact of economic and political change
• information divide/lack of access to information
• civic education, participation in and institutionalization of democratic processes

The East East Program: Partnership Beyond Borders was created in 1991 and is implemented through and according to the principles of the Soros foundations network. The East East Program supports 260 projects annually in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Mongolia. In 2002 in cooperation with the Southeast Asia Initiative/OSI New York, the East East Program: Partnership Beyond Borders expanded its mandate to offer support for international partnership to civil society institutions in southeast Asia.

The East East Program does not support

• conferences/congresses
• research projects
• hard science
• arts and culture events
• translation and/or publishing

Mary Frances Lindstrom
Program Director
mflindstrom@osi-eu.org