Good afternoon everybody. While our next star-studded panel is getting settled into their seats, we have another poll question for you. So go ahead and find your clickers if you would. In March 2017, so roughly a year from now, how many US troops will be operating on the ground in Syria? And take note, it's how many do you think will be operating, not how many do you think should be operating. So go ahead and find your clickers. And the results? So clearly an escalation. It's a difficult question. We're asking you to essentially predict the course of the current campaign, which if you're like me you find a bit unpredictable at times. But we will see, we will see. So as I said, a star-studded panel, unique in that we're not discussing how we plan or think about the conduct of conflict but how we resolve conflict, how we end wars. Here to help us work through this, as I alluded to, is an exceptionally array of experience and expertise, not just from Syria, but globally. Many of them have been introduced already before. I'll start on the extreme left. Rania Abouzade, an award-winning journalist and also a fellow at New America now writing a book on Syria. Janine Giovanni is the Middle East editor at Newsweek. Her book was already plugged by Anne-Marie, but she's also got an incredible amount of experience in Syria. Nia Rosen, a special advisor with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, been in Syria for about five years now on the ground. And last but not least, Michael Semple, former deputy EU special representative on Afghanistan and also a professor at Queens University in Belfast, one of your lesser-known affiliations given your expertise. And I'd like to start by just asking them to kind of make some brief opening remarks on something that we maybe take for granted. And that is, when we think about conflict resolution and we think about political processes to enable peace process, how important is it in how we define the conflict itself? How should we think about how we even frame the conflict before we start enough? We'll just start with you, Rania. With regard to Syria, for example, I think that although with time it is increasingly taken on a sectarian hue, the root causes are still primarily political rather than sectarian in the sense that the majority Sunni rebels, for example, will not hesitate to kill or imprison Sunni soldiers who are fighting with the regime. And in the same way, the regime soldiers will not hesitate to kill or imprison minorities. So I think that we have to be careful in terms of the narrative that we allow ourselves to believe in terms of what's really happening. And of course, with regard to Syria, it's not just about the Syrians, it's a proxy battlefield. And we have foreign fighters on all sides. We also have foreign political players on all sides. So I think it's important to understand the root causes and the principal drivers in terms of before we can talk about resolution. Janine? As I mentioned earlier, I've been reporting war for 25 years, so nearly 20 conflicts. So it's always very tempting for me to try to put war and ending war conflict resolution in terms of a template. When I began covering Syria in 2012, but of course in my 20 years working in the Middle East I had been there before, I started to begin to compare it to Bosnia and the end of the war in Bosnia. Now we know that the date and peace accords brokered by Richard Holbrook ended the war, ended the killing. 20 years on in Bosnia there are still grave problems. Mainly that it froze the front lines, it rewarded the perpetrators of violence and of war crimes. And in a sense it really exasperated any kind of ethnic tension. So my initial feelings of that I could compare the two wars, I began to see that I could not. They were very, very different. I think one of the gravest mistakes and we'll go into it in more depth I hope in terms of the Syrian peace process and the attempts to end the war in Syria have been the absolute lack of people like Nier on the ground that could identify the proper stakeholders and analyze them. And this is something that they really failed to do, leaving a huge disconnect between what's happening today in Geneva, Vienna and also Geneva 1 and Geneva 2, the frameworks with which they're trying to end the war. So there's a real mistake of diplomats and policy makers not to have enough identification from the ground, clarity from the ground. And I think it's basically one of the reasons why we've had such a protracted conflict and why we're having such difficulty getting the right people at the table because they haven't even begun to analyze who the characters are that need to talk, need to engage in dialogue, need to open up and really to understand them. So I think this is in my view one of the gravest errors that's been made so far in the peace process. Nier, Jeanine suggests that we don't even define the structure of the stakeholders and of the conflict itself correctly. Do you agree? Is that part of the problem? Yeah, but we've also, there's a total lack of knowledge of what's happening in Syria and in Iraq to a lesser extent, but it's still a problem. But even of the phase in which we're in, that you've asked me to discuss how the wars end, I don't think they're going to end in the foreseeable future. I think we're in the beginning of a new age, it's like the end of the ice age. If I could identify the moments, that would be 2003 when the invasion was like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It changed the entire ecosystem of the Middle East and created new identities and destroyed all identities. New species came into existence including a species called the Sunni Arab which hadn't existed as an identity really before, but suddenly became one. And the interventions, whether peace negotiations or military interventions in a way are kind of the continuous biological metaphor, they're halting a Darwinian process which may be essential and it would lead to winners and losers emerging much the way they did in Europe before modern Europe was established. So what we're going to see, however, I think is an evolution to a new reality, not any settlements, not any Dayton type agreements, but a gradual evolution in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and the region that I sort of work in to a reality of less war but constant instability where there is a strong central government that has authority in the capital, but the farther away you go, the less authority it has. This exists already in Pakistan and Mexico and Nigeria and elsewhere and that's the future of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, maybe even Egypt and parts of Tunisia and on and on in the Middle East. So Sykes-Picot won't disappear. The borders will remain the same, but the authority of governments in those borders will be far less and you'll have areas that will be under control of former insurgents turned collaborators with the central governments that can see that in Syria and then areas that will be totally out of control for many years to come until there's a gradual reintegration and this creature that was created from this sort of American asteroid that hit the Middle East in 2003, this new thing called Sunnis who think of themselves as Sunnis primarily, it's part of a very worrying trend which is going to be with us for a long time because more and more to be Sunni means to be Salafi or to be Wahhabi and that's a problem that's occurring from Mali all the way to Indonesia and the legacy of, it started with Iraq, but the legacy of this and specifically of the wars in Syria and Iraq are you going to have millions and millions of displaced people who happen to be Sunni Arab, their cities are destroyed probably forever, nobody's going to have the money to restore the Ramadi Mosul eventually, parts of Aleppo and on and on, every major Sunni city is almost destroyed and you're going to have a permanent population perhaps similar to the Palestinian refugee population in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, not to mention Europe, so longing to return and yet unable to. If I can end on a positive note though, the one nice thing I see is that the U.S. has at least finally embraced a policy of de-escalation as opposed to up until quite recently a policy of more violence, the whole approach was we're going to use more violence for cheap political change, all that did was worsen the conflicts, introduced foreign actors with a Russia or Iran, at least now there's a realization that our interventions, whether in Syria or Libya or elsewhere, have made things much, much worse and we should pursue a way to reduce the conflict as fast as possible. Thanks Nero, Michael. The conflict in Afghanistan, is this an insurgency in the classic sense or is this a proxy war imposed from externally? Well, the thing about ending it though is it's like giving up smoking, that they say it's easy to give up smoking, I've done it lots of times. And since 1989 we've ended the war in Afghanistan about six times, on average the war in Afghanistan ends every five years. And of course in the different processes where it has seemed to end, we've tried international agreements, national agreements, agreements which were implemented, agreements which fell dead on the first day without being implemented, we've even tried military victory a couple of times, we've had Taliban military victory, US military victory, all these things. And of course what happens is that there are some underlying drivers which have driven the violent conflict to resume quite soon. And yet each time there is a, there's a reconfiguration of the actors and of the conflict and that's why this is, I don't give you a straight answer to your question immediately because insurgency and proxy war, those are elements which have operated slightly different in the successive phases of the conflict. And where we are today is of course not quite where we hoped we would be. But today, it's 2016, we should be celebrating the 15th anniversary of the short military intervention to end a long war. And of course what we were meant to be celebrating was the, in the wake of that short military intervention, the consolidation of a sort of a, the Afghan equivalent of the liberal order. And we would be celebrating it and having cultural exchanges with them and feeling good. And of course it didn't happen. And if we want to understand, unpick the elements of insurgency and elements of proxy war and try and think about how next time it's going to end, we'd be looking at, okay, what were they factors and they're good, six or seven factors to be able to unpick. I'm not going to go through the list now because you won't let me. As to why those factors undid this plan, this idea of having a consolidated order in the wake of a short and very effective military intervention. And I think if we get into the discussion now and on other days, why it might be relevant to how wars end or indeed, as Nir is saying, how they drag on elsewhere. It's because of the six or seven factors that you can find which defeated the attempts to stabilize Afghanistan over the past decade and a half, they are likely to be present in many of the other conflict theaters that we look at. And certainly, you know, there's an awful lot of cross-fertilization between the conflict in Afghanistan and conflict in Syria. Well, let's go back to Syria. And in the, today's panel is timely, obviously, next week in Geneva, there's an expectation that talks on Syria will resume for our experts there. And you can pick a conflict because similarly, there's developing news in the other direction that talks or the outlook for talks in Afghanistan coming from the quadrilateral there are not as optimistic given the Taliban's posture. But how optimistic should we be about the course of these peace talks and what could be done to improve that outlook or that prospect? Renia, would you like to start? I mean, help us make sense of what we're about to see over the next couple of weeks. I haven't given much talk to the peace talks, to be honest, because they exist on a universe which is completely disassociated from what's happening on the ground. The regime is one thing, but when it comes to the various rebel groups, for example, the people who are in Geneva or wherever it might be who claim to speak for the anti-assad opposition generally speak for themselves, completely disconnected from the reality of what's happening on the ground. And the other thing is that, of course, the various spectrum of anti-assad groups, they just don't have a fixed address. They don't have the one sort of power, the one person, the one organization that can speak for all of them and that can influence them. Beyond the fact that they want to see the end of Assad, they differ in terms of what happens next. So that's one thing that doesn't sort of bode well for the talks, like who can implement on the ground whatever is decided in the peace talks. And if we were to talk about the current cessation of hostilities, for example, if you were to point that out and say, well, look, they listened to that, I think there was more about battle fatigue and fatigue on the ground than it is about listening to people who claim to speak for the political opposition in exile. Janine there, do you agree or disagree? See it differently? Yeah, I mean, I spent six months following Stefan de Mistura, the current special envoy around and he generously gave me time to observe how the peace process was working. And while I think I'll start off by saying I think he's got a disastrous job, Mission Impossible, and he has worked very hard, I think all three envoys, first Kofi Annan, Brahimi, and now de Mistura, have not really, in a sense, grasped what the concept is, nor have they been able to penetrate in any way, which seems to me any kind of long-term solution. And I think part of it is that, well, they're hampered by the fact that they're working with a UN mandate. That's the first thing. And I think that's very difficult. There's people that de Mistura cannot talk to. And I was talking to you earlier about how I've just finished a thesis at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on creative diplomacy in terms of Syria. So what lessons can we learn from the past? You know, we don't have a Holbrook type figure, a Richard Holbrook figure who was so instrumental in Bosnia because, basically, he was a bully. He was a bully that got things done. He made Milosevic and Izabegovic sit down together in Dayton. He held proximity talks. He made them see each other every day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner when they loathed each other. And eventually he got the deal closed at the 9th hour at the moment when he was about to write back to Washington and say, we can't do it. The war is going to continue. But there isn't a Holbrook-like character who has that kind of force or the United States behind him completely. It's in the hands right now of the UN. And I think that there's been a lot of mistakes made, but the biggest one has been, as Rainia said, they have not clearly identified the people that they should be talking to. That and Geneva 1 and Geneva 2 communicates, which basically set out the terms of the transition. I heard de Mistura saying yesterday, we're beginning to discuss this week in Geneva how the elections will take place. And the elections, they're still fighting. I mean, there has been this cessation of hostilities, but there still was 135 people killed in the first week alone. So it seems that there's this delusion, this delusional sense in Geneva or Vienna when they all came out high-flying each other, thinking they had ended the war. What the diplomats see from Europe is not at all what is happening on the ground. And I think until they address that, and that is something that Holbrook grasped that they don't seem to, I think they will never get any further. We might have as protracted wars. Lebanon, I hope not, but it doesn't seem that they're making any progress. And this is the third envoy, dedicated diplomats, who have been unable in any way to move it forward. Okay, good, thank you. My one concern is that having shocked everybody by adhering to the cessation for the most part, all the various players, the Russians, the regime, insurgents, et cetera, a hastier resumption of political talks may be the worst thing we can do right now because we might raise the issues that are provocative and result in some element saying to hell with this, I'm going to go back to fighting because I'm not going to get what I want. So I would have preferred that people enjoy a period of normalization for a few months before being confronted with the choice of go back to fighting or accept that you might not get what you want. However, what we have seen is that the insurgents have been remarkably coherent in their adherence to the terms and that also quite a surprise is the fact that the US was able to get them to do that given that the US has limited influence over the insurgents and limited influence over Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But what perhaps it can't be said exactly is that we are now conforming in part to the Russian dictates and if the US feels like it's a partner with the Russians, it's a bit more like the kid who's sitting on your lap in a car driving who thinks he's driving. But the terms of the conflict or the resolution have largely been defined by the Russian intervention which has removed issues of regime change from the table. That was a primary demand of many of the insurgents, of course, and certainly of Saudi Arabia. So bringing these issues up again so soon may be provocative. However, it also seems like the international players have largely accepted the Russian vision of what's going to happen in Syria and so perhaps we'll at least see a continued de-escalation but like I said, no actual settlement or end to the war. Let me change the question a little bit for you, Michael. Jeanine mentioned that sometimes we're not talking to the right people. How do we think about irreconcilables in a reconciliation process? How do we determine who the right people are to speak with? In the Syria context, we have Al Nusrah, which is outside the normal mental construct of kind of a two-dimensional fight. These are multi-dimensional where the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. In Afghanistan, the Haqqanis are part of the Taliban, but they've been designated a foreign terrorist organization. So how do we think about who to talk to and who's reconcilable and irreconcilable? Big challenges and I thought that the more degrees of freedom that we can provide to the people who are tasked with the diplomatic work, the better. In other words, it really sounds like a recipe for disaster to take somebody like Stefan de Mosura in charge of, okay, here are the ones you can talk to, here are the ones you can't talk to, please get the solution. Because if you want to stop the fighting, ultimately you have to get a critical mass of the fighters have got to be on board with your settlement, otherwise it's going to be fictitious. It's going to be like we've had several of those settlements previously in Afghanistan. I mean, they're signed and they're never implemented or they fall apart quickly. I actually hear it from some of the Taliban who I've had the privilege to talk to almost turned upside down. It's well known in sort of political practice that quite often movements use the process of negotiations of trying to boost their cohesiveness. The greatest proponent of this, or at least the practiser of this who I'm aware with was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who in the negotiations helped me lead to partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan. He set himself up as the soul spokesman. You're going to talk with Muslims, you're going to talk with me. Nobody else has the right to represent him. He managed to leverage the run-up to partition to consolidate his hold, build the Muslim League and ultimately make Pakistan a reality. When you find a situation like Afghanistan where we're in the current leadership of the Taliban, they're going for military victory. They see a relatively weak and dysfunctional government which is what's left of what we hoped for of the Afghan liberal order. They are prepared to wait and fight them out and they have emerged as the soul interlocutor for all our engagement over the past few years, even from the time of your previous incarnation. A lot of the people in the movement who have reached different conclusions from the people, those who are holding onto the leadership who believe that a perpetual conflict doesn't actually count as a victory for us. We can do better than that. They're frozen out when your engagement is essentially with a single address. I think that it's important to look for creative approaches in the engagement where you go for your workout. We know that we have to carry with us the main body of fighters but we also don't want to freeze out of the political process. We have to look for creative ways of bringing them in. Those who might be part of a process of change in the way that the actual fighting organization does business, creative thought there, and then there's a different part of the dilemma which is around the Afghan equivalent of the Syrian problem of those who are never going to sign up to any kind of deal and for the sake of argument in the other Afghanistan, we've got the al-Qaeda, we've got the Daesh, we rest assured there is a list of those who see the continuation of conflict as a political opportunity because they're like what used to be the Trotskyites in my days at university, you always had to have a protest about something so that you could organize and mobilize and build your ranks. These people are not going to be about part of some kind of consensus solution. And of course one has to understand them and probably one has to seek, one needs the discrete interaction with other parts of the armed people on that side where they have moved from a position of being in alliance with the irreconcilables to deciding that their future best interest may actually be disassociated from them, so we're hoping to marginalize them and being part of an emerging pro-peace coalition. So we've got to deal with the hardliners in power, we've got to deal with the piece-nicks who aren't in power but can still be useful and we've got to understand, but ultimately marginalize the irreconcilables. Before we, I'd like to give the audience a chance and while the microphones are getting ready, and going back to where we started, this question of how we see the conflict. I mean, when you look at this group, the one thing that strikes you, it certainly struck me, is the level of expertise you have not just overall but in the field, on the ground. These are people who watch the conflicts, see the conflicts firsthand, don't just read about them in capital. So how much of a gulf do you see between how we see these conflicts from capitals through the media versus what you see kind of firsthand on the ground? And how big of a gulf and how big of a problem is that? Janine? Well, I want to, I can address it, but I also want to ask Michael something. Do you feel we could get historical lessons from the Good Friday Agreement because, you know, as we know, John Major had said, it turns my stomach to think that we will ever speak to killers and murderers. And in terms of, and as we know, Jonathan Powell and others, Tony Blair, then went on and did talk to the IRA and made agreements with them. And historically, there's always been this repugnance about we can never speak to terrorists, we can't speak to killers, governments if people are held hostage. I'm French and American by nationality. I always carry my French passport because I know the French will pay for me if I'm kidnapped. Whereas the Americans or the Brits will not. So how do you draw the line? I mean, at some point, and I've been researching this, we, people do talk to Nusrah and ISIS perhaps might not be, it might not be ripe yet. It might not be the ripeness isn't there, the moment to negotiate or at least talk. But what about just opening up dialogue? And do you think we can learn from what happened in Stormont in those days and how it did eventually lead to the Good Friday Agreement? Which as, you know, I grew up in England in those times before and there was, it was like living in, people felt that it was a terrorist war. I mean, do we talk to terrorists as Jonathan Powell would put it? Terrorists who are designated by the State Department or the UN list. But these are the people, these are the very people we need to open dialogue with. So how do we get around that? Well, I mean, Secretary Clinton, obviously when she announced the U.S. policy on reconciliation with the Taliban tried to soften the blow by saying, well, you have to understand, in conflict you don't come to the table with your friends, you come to the table with your enemies. But in these multi-dimensional conflicts it clearly is not so simple, right? But let's, if you want to offer thoughts on the kind of the ground perspective versus the media perspective in terms of how we see the conflict and then let's go to the audience and get some questions. Nir? I used to be a journalist before I began this mediation thing. So I worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere and I've never seen a conflict so poorly reported and the reality on the ground, the Syrian conflict rather. I mean, Iraq was very terribly reported the issues of the embedded reporters and of lack of access and lack of Arabic experts or that lack of area experts in general. But in Syria even more so because Syria was kind of almost a black hole in terms of media and academia before the crisis began and then there was lack of access issues because the government was issuing visas or because it was too dangerous for most people and because of the Arab Spring euphoria where there was a sense that there was good guys and bad guys and this beautiful amazing thing is happening it's the best thing that ever happened and freedom is going to ring throughout the Arab world and so the complex narrative of Syria never emerged and it was immediately a good versus evil and also a simplistic sectarian narrative where it's an Alawite dictator oppressing a Sunni majority population which isn't true in Syria and we'd also simplified the sectarian narrative in Iraq. So it's been, it's obviously affected policy because most policy is based on information coming from open source as is most intelligence and people have no idea what's going on in Syria within the nature of the insurgency the nature of the militia's affiliate with the regime the regime's intentions and that's even when it comes to the Russians we've had to like go back to our Cold War experts on the Soviet Union to try to understand the Russians and so we've demonized them and everything they do must be bad because it's the Russians doing it even if we happen to actually, we can't say it but be allied quite closely with the Russians and even with the Iranians and Hezbollah in these conflicts to maintain this good guy, bad guy kind of narrative. Rene any thoughts before we go to the audience? No, I mean I agree with a lot of what Nier said but just to add to it Egypt was always more than Tahrir Square but the people through which the story was told was so small that it was focused on a particular part of the country which wasn't really representative of what was happening in much of the rest of the country and it's the same thing across the Middle East this idea of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys good people do bad things and bad people can do good things and you have to consider that spectrum and the world is completely grey and we have to approach it as such in our reporting, in our writing, in our discourse. Well let's open up this incredible group of expertise to the audience. Okay go ahead and then we'll go to the audience Michael. I think it was very relevant the question you're asking about the field knowledge versus what's been thought far away because in Afghanistan my understanding of what's happened is that one reason that attempts at intervention particularly from the US have been sort of thwarted and they've achieved outcomes different from what people anticipated was because many of the actors on the ground in Afghanistan are absolutely superb at disinformation, at manipulating relationships and when people talk about on a strategic level but when people talk about a proxy war they refer to evil powers paying their proxies to do things for them whereas my understanding it always works the other way round it's very clever, well informed, astute Afghan actors who are thinking this is what I want to achieve against such a person, they're more powerful than me who can I enlist unwittingly preferably to support me in overcoming my local rival and that's how they dealt with the Soviets and how they played their civil wars that's how they have duped Pakistan and that's how they're gaming the US and what they play upon is indeed this asymmetry of information they're superbly well informed and we are superbly badly informed Ending wars is a matter of propaganda war so let's go to the audience please if you could state your affiliation, your name and please use the microphones Pete App, Simon Global Affairs columnist at Reuters I mean who in government should own this because I'm really struck by the fact it's a fact people like Janine really know how these wars work but there's no counterpart in Whitehall or Washington I mean maybe Michael was in Afghanistan but by and large if you go to a Roman building in Washington everyone's talking about ISIS no one has that kind of granular knowledge of Syria or even Afghanistan so where in government should own this expertise? by this you mean the political process of who in government should be the person who actually knows what these groups want who realizes they're being played by some local warlord in a town they've never heard of Anybody want to take a stab at recommendations to the governments? Well that should be the role of intelligence and State Department for our ministry however the fact that they can't do that is further evidence that we shouldn't play these games in the first place that these interventions lead to secondary and tertiary consequences that are totally out of our imagination out of our control as at least as Western institutions so don't do it because there's nobody in the government who can do it especially in democracy where people are rotating constantly so the advantage of authoritarian states is that at least they have longevity of people in charge of these files and you see that in the way that the Syrians or the Iranians and other states in the Middle East are able to handle these conflicts a bit more long term when they're thinking because it's the same people who are in charge for so long the West just can't do it Janine? I was having this discussion with a group of diplomats a few weeks ago and the days of the old-fashioned British Arabists working for the Foreign Office are over in a sense and once there was a time when they would have experts and put them in the field and information gathering was much more robust and I think now one of the things I've certainly noticed following the UN process is that the people involved in the back offices don't have any interest in Syria or Afghanistan or Yemen or Libya they're trying to move their pay grades up and they're locked in their own bureaucracy that there really isn't the kind of desire I think and that feeds into the whole political will so I mean I think that we've lost the kind of specialization and the expertise and a bit of if you want to link it to the media in a sense the Arab Spring was this jubilant time when there was a lot of optimism but it drew a lot of reporters who had never not only reported conflict before but the Middle East and because of what Rania was saying about our shrinking business and resources and freelancers are used more now who are brave and will go into Syria or Libya or wherever but they don't have the context of putting it into the whole geopolitical scenario they don't know about the first Intifada or the second Intifada or what actually happened in Yemen or the background of Saddam so we live in times because of shrinking resources where we're less reliant on experts and on people who really know what they're doing from the ground and that's why I'm very happy to be with this panel because everyone here has really done their time in the field and I think policy makers should listen to us more because you're not ready to go into government yourself I might I might be So you've enlisted one Any other thoughts? Back here this gentleman with the glasses and the red tie My name is Joseph Schneider and the question I have we know there's a lot of constraints and a lot of bad experiences in our attempts and not much success so what do you think our objectives should be in these sort of situations to establish a cordon sanitaire and let everyone just go at it and just make sure it doesn't spill over or should we have more direct objectives and then find ways to actually influence events on the ground What's the objective? First of all there's no common objective not even for the West the UK, France, Germany, the US all have very different interests in the region who have their own interests when it comes to Syria or Iraq or likewise I'm sure in Afghanistan we don't have the same objectives but it's also the question seems to imply that we're just minding our business sitting at home watching TV and oh my god this war started in Syria or Iraq but we're deeply implicated certainly in Iraq but even in Syria both because it's the legacy of Iraq but also because we've thrown plenty of fuel as America on that fire so there's a sense of responsibility and a continued involvement the objective should be from a moral point of view and from a security point of view to reduce conflict, not to escalate conflict the policy has been certainly in the last few years it's not the last few decades or centuries to escalate conflict by intervention, by removing states and in my experience as it is in Iraq, Libya Yemen, Syria the intervention whatever the intentions are how well-intentioned we may be leads to further conflict so the primary goal should be on reducing violence both from a humanitarian point of view and from a point of view of protecting Western security interests and preventing refugee flows and all that others? Michael? I think that it is a legitimate and appropriate objective for great powers like the United States to promote peace and of course there can always be other objectives as well but there are lots of positive spin-offs from peace and we all know that peace is far more than just the absence of violent conflict it's a legitimate objective if you build that in as one of your important objectives you're also with as much understanding of what works and what doesn't work and Mia is throwing lots of warnings of recent experience of what doesn't work but also if you accept peace as an objective you also have to accept the timeline that goes with it because something which has defeated many international projects over the years is the attempt to get things done in completely unrealistic time tables which may have some relevance to local political cycles but not to what can be done so promote peace and be prepared to try for a long time to create the conditions so that eventually you succeed okay let's try to get more questions in here please let's go back to the audience back here in the corner Matt? Matt Frankel getting back to the subject of the Topicalities Wars of the Future and if you accept the premise that Iraq, Syria, Yemen is going to become Libya it's going to become more the norm of how small conflicts are fought in other words multi-parties with conflicting means and external intervention how do we solve these problems we've come a long way from the old insurgency template of the U.S. on one side the Soviets on the other side we get the two parties to the table and work it out or one side as near possibly maybe just fight it out but conflicts are now multi-party thank you can you do that briefly a model for resolving 21st century conflict again you know I'm often drawn back to the Bosnia but I don't think in this case again I don't think that Syria fits into the template of Bosnia I mean I'm tempted to say and in hindsight it is absolutely no use that Syria could have had we had more long-term strategic insight into ending it it could have been prevented but I could say the same thing about Bosnia in 1993 there were chances all along where the war could have been ended, halted thousands of lives could have been saved and 2013 in Syria right after Ghouta and the red line might have been an opportunity when the war certainly could have been cut short but then as we know what happened with Cameroon and Parliament and then Obama's decision I think the whole policy of nonchalance has been deadly and it's had serious repercussions not just in Syria but throughout the region in terms of the Russian involvement purely from a civilian point of view since September 30th since they began their airstrikes there's been more civilian casualties that will tell me that they're more frightened of the Russian airstrikes than they were before from the Assad strike so I don't know actually I think that a lot of this could have been preventive examining the conflict early on and seeing what steps could have been taken to shorten it and to contain it perhaps but I think now I have a very gloomy outlook and I'm not gloomy by nature Anyone like to have the last word? Renia? Final closing thought If we look at the failures and the barriers to progress across these new conflicts the failures are primarily political and the military piece has been there but it just hasn't been able to deliver if it's not supported by effective political action so I think one of the approaches for dealing with these multi-actor uncertain timeline difficult conflicts is rebalancing our effort between the military and the political ensuring that any military action if it is required is backed up by effective political action which is up to the complexity of the environment in which it operates so that despite the complaints we had about lack of expertise and so on we acquire that and we have multiple channels for engaging multiple addresses that we use and we get creative the kind of actions that we can use drying up the finance doesn't just mean bombing facilities there are other ways of drying up finance I always felt that the act of getting over 100,000 troops onto the other side of the world and being supplied with water was such beyond huma... when you think of all the challenges involved it's absolutely massive so anybody who says what we're talking about is a political challenge of these conflicts it's nothing compared with supplying water for 100,000 troops on the other side of the world let's get serious and do it so the military deserves to be complemented by effective political action commensurate with the complexity of the conflict that we're dealing with inspirational insights from an experienced group thank you very much please join me in thanking this great panel


I gotta be honest, I'm scared for you guys. I'm scared for you because you're not protecting your heart. You scroll social media with a wandering eye, consuming the content buffet that is offered up with little discretion to what is nourishing versus what is poisonous. It's just a joke, it's just a video, it's just a dance, it's just a podcast. No, these are thoughts, ideas, images, philosophies, pictures that are feeding your soul and friend to often their pollutants. Would you drink a cup of fresh water with a teaspoon of toilet water in it? No you wouldn't. Please, that you would have just as high of a standard of what you let your heart meditate on because that is what you will become.


Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar today, Get to Know GrantStation. I'm Susan Hope-Bart here at TechSoup, and I'm going to be your host today. Before I turn it over to Jeremy and Sarah at GrantStation, I'd just like to navigate through our platform that we use to deliver our webinars. It's called ReadyTalk. What you are seeing on your screen right now is a slide about using ReadyTalk. And on the far left there should be a column that is your chat box. You've probably seen a few chats from me already as the chairperson just letting you know that if you have any audio problems you can use a phone or Skype to call in. On the chat box is there for you to ask your questions. You don't need to raise your hand. You can simply chat your questions in. Jeremy, Sarah, and I are monitoring the chat box, and we will queue up your questions for responses during our question and answer session. Also if you have any tech problems you can't hear, you've tried calling in, or you have a problem viewing the slides, or the live screen sharing, let us know in that particular chat box. And then we can work with you to help you on the tech end. If you lose your Internet connection you can reconnect using the link emailed to you. All the lines are muted so we can get a good clear recording. We do post this recording on our archives. The webinar will be available on our TechSoup website in a few days, www.techsoup.com, community, events, webinars, or on our YouTube site. You will receive an email with the very short slideshow. Mostly this is going to be live screen sharing where Jeremy and Sarah will take you to the GrantStation website and show you the amazing things that GrantStation can do for your organization. But you will get this PowerPoint and a link to the recording. You can also tweet using our hashtag T.S. Webinars. A brief introduction to Jeremy and Sarah from GrantStation. They do all of our GrantStation tours where they navigate through the platform and show you the many features. And there's actually a new site so they're going to be showing us all the new features which is super exciting. And I'm here with TechSoup on the Training and Education Manager. And just to get a sense from where you're from, right now I am joining from San Francisco, California. And Sarah is joining from Alaska. And I believe Jeremy, you are too? I am. We're just in slightly different locations around the Fairbanks area. Great, great. Thanks. So tell us everybody on the webinar right now, chat in. So check your fastest fingers. Let us know where you're joining us from, city, state, or country that you're joining us from. And as you do that, I'm going to tell you about the special that we have. It's the GrantStation special offer that we run. It's May 16th through 17th. And what it is is this gives you the opportunity to get a discounted one year membership for only $99. That's $200 less than the regular discounted fee that we have at TechSoup, and $600 less than retail. Now the caveat is everybody is that you want to wait until May 16th and 17th to place this order. So to put it in your cart and then check out to get the discounted offer. And you can go to http://info.techsoup.org slash GrantStation. And I will chat that out to everyone so you can log into that. And you can put it in your email and you'll get a reminder when the promo goes live. So without any further ado, I do wish to turn this over to Jeremy and Sarah, and I know you're going to enjoy this as much as I have during the past GrantStation tours. Jeremy and Sarah, it's all yours. Take it away. Well thank you so much Susan. This is Sarah Kennedy. And I want to welcome everyone to the new GrantStation.com. You'll be glad to know we still have the same great content and the same high quality listings of GrantMakers. However, with the new system, your searches will be more responsive so you'll get results just seconds after you click the criteria. We'll show you how this new system works in just a few minutes. And I know you already answered your city and state into the chat box, but if you do it one more time some of you with just a few keywords that describe your organization's mission, we'll show you how easy it is to use GrantStation as your research tool. In the meantime, we have a new look on our home page which highlights specific terms of interest for you each week. And during this time together that we have today, we want to show you how you can do all your research on GrantStation from identifying the right funders to building a grant seeking strategy that you and other members of your organization can use in the coming year. Now for those of you who are TechSoup members who don't know when your expiration date is on your membership, you can log in to GrantStation and it'll tell you right after you log in it will give you your account information. Jeremy's going to show you how to do this. But for right now, I'm going to turn this over to Jeremy Smith and he's going to tell you a whole lot more. I am.  My name is Jeremy Smith. I'm GrantStation's Communications Technology Director. And what I focus on here at GrantStation is making sure our website works and it's efficient and it's really helpful when you're trying to do all of your grant research for your organization or for your specific project. Now, GrantStation itself is a set of tools and resources that helps organizations identify and secure grant dollars. GrantStation itself is a publishing company. Research and writing are our skill sets and we really pride ourselves in publishing current and forward-looking information about grant makers. Now all the grant maker profiles on GrantStation, both government and private, are for lack of a better description what we call in the game. Now that means these profiles reflect grant makers who are actively accepting requests or letters of inquiry from a variety of nonprofits. Now you may have used some other services where you do your research, you get hundreds of returns, leaving you with a really long list of potential funders that you have to screen without really knowing how relevant they are to your specific needs. Our job at GrantStation is to pre-screen grant makers. So the time that you spend researching generates a list of grant makers that may truly accept a request to fund your organization's program or project. So really think of GrantStation as your back room research team, pre-screening funders, so we're feeding you the most relevant funders for your program or project. Now for those of you joining us today who are not yet members or considering a membership, you can actually preview the number of results in the charitable giving databases prior to login. This is a new feature at GrantStation. And I'll show you more about how to do this in just a second, so I'm going to move around a little quickly right now. But if we simply go into our U.S. charitable, and again I'm not logged in yet, and if I simply click on National Grant Makers who give across all the states, I can quickly see how many results there are. There are 914 results listed right here. And now I can't see them until I log in, but I can also add further things, further criteria for instance. Let's say I'm based in California. I saw many people were in California taking today's tour. If I click California, instantly what happens, you see how many results we can now look through. Right now we have a listing of all the funders who give across the U.S. and specifically within California. What if I'm also working in New York as well? Well I simply click New York, and now that's added to my search criteria and you see my results keep expanding. So this is a really quick way. Without even being a member or logging into GrantStation, you can simply see how many results are available. But it's not just where you're located geographically. There's also all the further ways you can search by specific areas of interest, the target population, what type of support you're looking for, the type of grant maker, or even where the grant maker is located. And we'll talk more about how to do more in-depth searches. But you can basically do searches without seeing results without being a member of GrantStation. This is a great way for you to see if GrantStation is the right product for you without having to spend your money. And if it looks like you're getting results for the right amount for your specific needs, then by all means, take advantage of this very, very special promotion that we have going on. Now in addition, you can also preview all of our tutorials as well. If you go over to our Help section, and then you click on Tours, you can actually see the different tours we have available, which include an overview tour that cover everything, and then two specific focus tours, one that covers U.S. Charitable Giving Database that we'll spend time in today, as well as our Canadian Charitable Database and our Canadian Government Listings. We have quite a few features here at GrantStation, and these tours are a great way to go at your own speed and see how they work for you. And for those of you who are current members of GrantStation, you can quickly log into the website right over here by clicking on Login, and then you can enter in your specific login information. Now this is also where you can log in to see when your subscription expires. So once you've logged in, you can actually go ahead and click on My Profile, and it will tell you when your specific subscription or your membership actually expires. And mine is good until 2018, but what you can also do with any purchase you make for TechSoup, this will actually add a year to your existing membership. So if you already are a member, you can quickly just add a year to whenever your current year ends. So you're not going to lose anything. You'll just gain an extra year from the end of your current membership. So right now I'm going to go ahead and back up a little bit. And since Sarah had everybody go ahead and put in some specific information about their projects and what their specific focus is at their organization, let's do one really quick sample search. Okay, sounds good. Donald is looking for support for music in Oregon. In Oregon, perfect. This is actually going to let me show you a couple cool things. And we have many searches we're going to show today. But first of all, under Geographic Scope, we're going to go ahead and choose National Grantmakers and also click on Oregon as well. Then we're going to go ahead and once it's updated we can see we have 984 results that we can go through. We're going to slide on down now to our area of interest. And I'm not exactly sure what music would fall under. I'm betting it's under Arts, Culture, and Humanities. And I'll tell you why that's important. So right here we have Music. I'm going to go ahead and click on that one. And then see we now have 80 specific results that popped up. This is probably my favorite feature of the new website that we have. You can actually change the number that show on a given page. So you can actually see 50 results, or 100 results, or 20 results all on one page. So you can quickly go through everything that's shown up that fits your specific need and criteria. Now we will spill in a little bit more time doing more searches later on, but we have a lot we want to go ahead and cover in today's site. But I'm just showing you how easy it is to see what's available. Now besides the rich grant information that we have on our website, we also published two specific newsletters which highlight various upcoming funding opportunities. You can find both of them under the Public Resources section, and that's the GrantStation Insider and the GrantStation International Insider. The GrantStation Insider is a weekly newsletter that focuses on 10 distinct opportunities for U.S. nonprofit organizations. And we also have the monthly GrantStation International Insider. This feature is 16 international funding opportunities including a number of opportunities for Canadian neighbors. And all of the listings that are in these newsletters are also all listed in our databases as well. So if it's in the newsletter, you can definitely find that in our database. Now all these newsletters are posted, as I mentioned, under the Public Resources section of our website. You'll also find links to Trend Track here, Pathfinder, and our online education section here as well. Now I'll come back to these areas a little bit later in the tour and explore these resources more. Now near the top of the page are links to all of our key features. And GrantStation has always had a certain way we're set up. And it's just an easy way to quickly understand where you are and what you need to do. We've basically divided up into three main sections. We have Find, Build, and Write. Now under our Find section, it will open up to the Search section where all the databases are located. And when you click on, for instance, Build Strategy which is right next to it, you'll access tools that will help you build a solid grant seeking strategy. And then when you go ahead and click on Write Proposals, this is where you'll find step-by-step tutorials that you can use to write compelling grant proposals. Now if we go ahead and scroll down, here on our front page, we can actually come across our online education section. And this is the area that Sarah is pretty much, she knows this area forward and backward. Do you want to quickly mention what our online education section is for, Sarah? Sure. This is open to the public as well as GrantStation members. And it's fee-based for everyone. But we have some excellent opportunities. You can take it as an individual or you can take these webinars as a group from two to ten people who are in different locations and on different devices. So you don't even have to be in one room to take it. And our presenters, excuse me, are from all over the country with different areas of expertise in grantsmanship. So this change is constantly, so if you're interested in your career development and you want some more information on writing grants or all different aspects of grant writing, you might want to check this out from time to time. So I'm going to scroll a little bit further down on our page. And for people who have been to GrantStation before, things have changed a little bit. We have a couple cool little interactive slides here, which I'm going to slowly let them go ahead and register so you can see what they do. Sort of our GWIS feature we have on the front page of our website. We also have lots of great information here, but for our tour we're going to focus in on specific funding alerts. So if we scroll down on our front page, we can go to our Funding Alerts section. Now these alerts in our Funding Alerts section change weekly, and as with all of our announcements here at GrantStation, this information is carefully curated, providing you with the most current information about specific grant opportunities. So we'll go ahead and click on this National Funding Alert right here for Project Learning Tree. Now all of our database profiles are written in a narrative format. This really allows us to provide you with detailed information about the grant makers and their specific program. So here's a grant makers profile over here on the left-hand side. This includes the specific areas of interest and any application procedures. Now on the right-hand side, you'll see the following information about the grant maker. You'll see their website link right here at the very top, where they give, in this case their geographic scope is within the USA, any specific content information along with the grant maker information below that, any financial information, application information. And right down here at the very bottom, we have the date when it was last updated. Now when we create and update these records, and we're constantly going through and modifying, removing, and adding records, we gather as much information as we can from the web, from their IRS 990 form, and from other databases. And then our researcher drafts a profile which we send directly to the grant maker for their review. The question that we ask the grant maker when they review their record is not just is this information correct, but also are we capturing not only what they will fund now, but what they plan to fund in the next year? And we do this because although it's interesting to know what they've funded in the past, it's much more helpful to know what they will fund today, tomorrow, and into the future. In short, the real question is will they consider funding your organization right now? The grant maker reviews this profile, they often make changes, and then send it back to us. We do a final edit, and then we publish it in our database. So this process results in grant maker profiles that are unlike anything else to read on the web, not even on their own website. Our researchers focus on publishing quality information that will make your job easier, hence the idea of thinking of GrantStation as your Backroom Research Team. Now before we get into our searches, I just want to explain our main sections in a little bit greater detail and show you how they can aid you in your search for funding. Now I quickly went over them before, but I'm just going to go in a little bit more depth right now. In our Build Strategy section, we have an interactive tool called Grants 2020. Now this can provide a clear picture of where your organization's grant program is today, and more importantly, how it needs to grow in the next several years. In addition, GrantSeeking Calendar and Creating Time, these are tutorials that focus on how to design and develop GrantSeeking strategies, and they really work hand-in-hand when creating a strategy that works for you and your organization. And we'll come back later to GrantSeeking Calendar in today's tour. Under the Write Proposals section, you can find tools that help you write and submit compelling letters of inquiry, or even a full grant proposal. We have Getting Started. This outlines all the documentation you should have at your fingertips before you begin writing grant requests. We also have a short tutorial on writing a letter of inquiry. This is really helpful when trying to consider what should and should not be included when you're putting together an LOI. And we also have the full proposal. I'm going to go ahead and click on that one right now. This is a step-by-step approach to writing a grant, which includes downloadable samples of award-winning grant proposals followed by a series of articles for editing and revision your full proposals. Now don't underestimate the value of reviewing these award-winning grant proposals that we have. And if we go ahead and scroll down here on the full grant proposal, you can see all the parts of this particular article that we have. As I mentioned earlier, we also have downloadable samples of award-winning proposals. If you click on award-winning proposals and then you click on samples of award-winning grant proposals, these are all downloadable grant proposals that we've collected over the years. This is a really valuable thing to have because you'll get tons of ideas on how to present your own case for support by reviewing these truly well-developed examples. And just a side note, each year we run a contest for the best-written grant proposals. Now all these contestants are then judged by panel organized by Grant's Professional Association and the award winners are then used as examples on Grant's Station. So at this point, I think we should conduct a few thorough searches that really show how useful our site is for your grant research needs. So the big question that many people ask us is how do you go about it to find the best grant makers to approach? Or how do you even create a grant seeking strategy for that matter? So first, here are a couple scenarios for today. We're seeking funding for animal welfare in the state of Minnesota, and we also want to start an after-school program which deals with obesity and youth. So we recommend that you begin by doing two specific types of research, primary and secondary research, and we'll explain what each of them is and how to do them. Once you've gone through both of these research steps, you'll really have the foundation for your grant seeking strategy. So prior to preparing your searches, we recommend clicking on Find Grant Makers and then looking at our preparation section. We can go ahead and click on Overview right now. Within this section, you will find the project description worksheet as well as our search terms. Now using the project description worksheet which is a word-based download, this will help you organize your approach, flesh out your budget, and really serve as a solid foundation for your grant seeking strategy. This is a document that you can save, and then you can add pertinent information related to your search, and this can then be handed off to other members of your team for further research or stored and referenced at a later date. Now we also encourage our members to familiarize themselves with our search terms. I'll go ahead and click on that right now. The search terms, this is the key terminology used on our website, and this really serves as a great guide when doing your keyword research. To use this area, you would Ctrl-F or Command-F on your keyboard and it pops up a search box, and then you go ahead and enter in a specific keyword to see which categories you want to check when you're searching. Earlier I was trying to find music, so if I type in music for instance, I can see that music itself, which includes specific topics, commissioning new work, educational programs, and production support is specifically under the heading of Arts, Culture, and Humanities. I would make a note of this on my project description worksheet so I'd know what to search in the future. So using our earlier example of Animal Welfare, let's go ahead and type that in quickly, and it will actually jump to the first instance of Animal, but since I'm focusing on Animal Welfare, you can see that Animal Welfare has its very own heading under Environment and Animals. So I'd make a note of this on my project description worksheet. And the reason I do this is these are the actual keywords, these are the actual terms that the grant makers use. Sometimes an organization uses different words from the grant maker. What this search term section does, it allows you to find the exact same terms, which will make your searches much, much more fruitful. So let's go ahead and begin our grant search, also known as primary research, by moving into our US state government section. I'm going to go ahead and click back to top. And then if I click search here, it'll give me a listing of all the different areas I can search through. So we're going to go ahead and start off, as I mentioned, in our US state government section. And again, looking at our scenario, we're based in Minnesota, so we'll go ahead and click on Minnesota. Now GrantStation offers listings of US federal and state funded agencies, state funded agencies, and state departments for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia that offer financial and technical assistance programs. Now all the links that you see here will take you directly to the agency or department pages, which deal specifically with funding. Now for the next step in our primary research, we can look at what's offered by the US government in our US federal section. So if I go ahead and click back, and click on US federal, I can search through federal grants and loans. Now you can search through this section using eligible applicants, funding agencies, areas of interest, funding opportunity number, and CFDA number, along by searching by specific keywords. Now the funding options available within the US state and federal government sections are important information to collect. Because when you apply to private funders, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case you don't find any options, you can also say at this time there are no federal programs that can help us with our need. That way the private funder knows that you've done your homework, that speaks to your credibility as an organization, and that private funding is the only option for now. So once you've completed your federal research, you can now move on to the US charitable database. So I'm going to go ahead and close these windows that open. We're going to click on US charitable at this point. Now this particular database which I showed you earlier lists thousands of funder profiles including independent, family, community, and corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, and really any association with a grant making program. Now all these profiles are searchable by geographic scope, area of interest, type of support, name, and by keywords. Now in the content area, which is right here in the middle, you'll find a handy guide to help you through the search process. Now on the right-hand side is the navigation area. This is where you enter in your specific criteria. Now under geographic scope, you can choose to search for global grant makers giving to US-based organizations, but for now let's choose national grant makers. And then let's click on Minnesota from the drop-down menu. So once I click on national, it'll immediately update the number of options for me. And then from selecting my state grant maker, I'm going to choose Minnesota. Now you'll notice how each criteria is listed right here at the top as we make our selection. And with each new selection, the results are instantly displayed. We also want to point out that you can click on and off each option. This is so you can be more creative and thoughtful in your searches. As each new criteria is added or subtracted, it will broaden or narrow the funding opportunities being displayed. So this initial process of choosing our geographic scope allows us to cast our net as wide as possible, combining national opportunities with state or even region-based ones to really see just how broad our grant universe is. Now once we start selecting other criteria, our results will begin to narrow to funding opportunities that are a perfect fit for our needs. And what's that ready now to select our area of interest, which we researched earlier and I'm assuming made a note on our project description worksheet and that's under environment and animals and animal welfare. So if I go down to area of interest and I go down to environment and animals and I go ahead and check the box animal welfare. So right now you can see at the very top I have 53 results available. So let's add another criteria at this point. This time it's going to be a specific type of support and we're going to go ahead and choose under type of support. We'll simply go for general operating support. So now we're down to 22 specific results. And let's go ahead and follow this with a change again but only in the support type. So if we go down to type of support and we uncheck general operating support it will update automatically. We'll scroll down again and under type of support we're going to choose, excuse me, a specific type of support in this case equipment. So we're looking for equipment donations. So those 22 results have now dropped to 13 specific results. Now if you want to narrow this a bit more we can go ahead and remove national from the geographic search area by clicking the minus button right here. And then we can focus on funders who specifically give just a Minnesota. I'd really recommend this route just to get the strongest potential funders up front. So under our current search criteria if we look just within Minnesota with a specific area of interest of animal welfare a specific type of support of equipment we have five specific results. I also like to point out here near the bottom of the page we have a keyword search as well. Now this is a really powerful way to narrow your searches. We really suggest that you exercise caution in this area. You do not want to narrow your searches down too much because remember the keywords you enter are not necessarily the words that the funder uses. For example if we add rescue here we'll go ahead and type that in and hit click on submit. It's narrowing results down to one specific result. Let's go ahead and remove this. As you can see keyword is right here. We can click the little check box next to it which removes rescue. And now we're back up to five specific results. Now as I mentioned earlier if your organization is working in a few different states you also have the option of selecting another state to broaden your search at any point in the search process. This is a big change from our previous site. So if we scroll down here to our state section let's say that our animal welfare organization is working in a tri-state area Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. So we'll go ahead and click on Iowa at this point and it will update and increase our results from five to ten. And we're going to go ahead and add in another one, in this case Wisconsin. And now that's increased our results from 10 specific results to 12 results. Now you're also going to want to search for funders that might be a bit outside the box. For example in Minnesota you might want to research some vendors such as whomever you bank with or the local or regional utility company. But at this point let's turn to our second search that I have an after school program that educates students regarding obesity. So we'll clear out all these sections, click clear all, and start anew. We can go ahead and start with national grant makers to give across all the states. And we could add a specific state if necessary just to broaden our search as much as possible. And I saw a couple of people here who were in Kansas so I will go ahead and use Kansas as our example. So looking at my keyword research I did earlier I know that I have two good options for my specific scenario. Again my scenario is for an obesity and healthy eating nutrition after school program. So if I go down to our types of support or actually areas of interest and I go ahead and take a look at our health and wellness category. There are two specific options here. I have healthy eating nutrition and healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. Now if I select two of them it will really narrow my results. So I'll just select one for now and I'll click on healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. So right now we're looking at 44 specific results. Let's add in my specific target population. Again it's an after school program so if I go into my target population I can choose just children and youth. Of course this area is really powerful as well. You can focus on just specific populations such as minorities, seniors, veterans, etc. But for our search this time we'll click on children and youth. And now we're looking at 31 total results. We can now narrow this down by searching only within a specific state. In this case it's going to be Kansas. So drop your results to 17. And then of course we can see all of them on one page by clicking on that drop down box. This is an excellent number that we can quickly look through and see if the profiles are a match to our specific mission or project. And again as I mentioned you can start your searches in any order and add or subtract the criteria to refine your search results. Now in addition to these US based grant maker listings we also have three other unique areas to search through, our international and Canadian charitable databases along with our Canadian government section. You can simply find them from right up here. Clicking on our international charitable link here this database contains grant listings that are beneficial to organizations working outside the US. Let's say for instance we're focusing on addressing the issue of hunger in Kenya. So we'll simply start with grant makers who focus on developing countries. Oh sorry, not developing countries. We're actually going to click the one right below that. Again it's a new site. I'm learning a little bit here and there. Clicking on continental grant makers who have given specific continents. Again we're focusing on Kenya which is in Africa. So I click on Africa. Then I can add a national grant maker who gives specifically within Kenya which is again my focus. So we're looking at 205 results at this point and you can see our current search criteria is within Africa and Kenya. Then we can add in a specific search term or keyword. In this case it is hunger. When we click submit we'll see the results narrow down to 16. And we can also see the geographic scope of each of these grant makers as well. I'm also going to show you quickly our Canadian Charitable Database. This has profiles of grant makers who provide support specifically within Canada. So let's say we're working on a health related project in British Columbia. Again we'll click on national grant makers who give across all provinces. Then we can narrow that down to a specific province. In this case it's British Columbia. And again our focus is going to be on health or health related project. So we'll simply enter in health at this point and click submit. So we're looking at 232 results. We can always narrow this by focusing only on organizations that give specifically within British Columbia. By clicking the little box next to Canada we can narrow that down to 89 results. We can further narrow this down by adding more search criteria. Now in addition we also have listings in our Canadian government section for national and provincial funded agencies provincial funded agencies, and provincial departments for each of the provinces and territories of Canada that offer financial and technical assistance programs. So once you've done all this primary research you'll really have an extensive list of potential funding sources. As I stated earlier in the build strategy section of GrantStation we have a step-by-step tutorial called creating a grant seeking calendar which is just grant seeking calendar shortened right here. So really help you with your next steps which we refer to as secondary research. At this point Sarah has some information to share. Thanks Jeremy. So in this section I'm going to show you the decision matrix. And this is a tool to build a grant seeking calendar. The decision matrix will help you establish an annual grant seeking calendar that will keep your grant seeking focused on those programs and projects that need the funds. So Jeremy showed you earlier how you fill out the project description worksheet and you identify the funders. Well now you're going to want to establish basic criteria for judging whether a grant opportunity is worth your organization's investment of time and energy. This is a real true time saver here. So say that you have 15 identified 15 different funders whether they're federal, state or private or international. And now you're going to start doing your secondary research. So what you want to do is create this decision matrix and we've given you a real good start here. It's not set in concrete. You can add your own criteria as well for your organization. But what you're going to want to do, this matrix, this will establish a set of criteria. It's going to be rows and each are assigned a weight in the column and when you apply this it will influence your decision on whether to add this particular grant maker to your grants calendar. So the numbers go from 1 to 5 for positive and negative 1 to negative 5 for negative. So as you go through this different criteria you're going to assign a number. Then scroll down just a little bit more Jeremy because it's hard to show this all on one screen. You're going to have a number. You're going to use 34 for right now. So if you take each funder and you come up with a number, the ones that score 34 are lower for whatever reason. Set them aside and you can come back to that later whether it's deadlines or not enough funds or for whatever reason. And the ones with the score of 35 and above you can now start even doing more secondary research but you can put it into a calendar form. And this may seem complicated but it's not because when you have a membership to GrantStation we're going to walk you through all these steps. So Jeremy let's show them what a grant seeking calendar would look like. So say I found you know 10 out of those 15 that look good. You can now list that grant maker, the amount you're going to request, and the deadline. And you start developing a grant strategy for your organization. You can share this strategy with your co-workers, with your executive director, with your board of directors. And it's a way for you to go forward knowing full well that you are still in the vetting process of vetting these funders. And one of the really nice things about this is if someone comes to you and says, oh I have this great funding opportunity, we should apply for it. You now have a tool that you can use that decision matrix. You can just say I'm going to run it through the matrix and then you're going to vet that funding opportunity and see if it does fit into your overall strategy. So we have all those five different steps of how to develop that decision matrix and how to create that grant seeking calendar. But even with this you're not done with your secondary research. So we've got all these tools on the website that you can use for your additional research. One of them is the IRS Form 990. Now, GuideStar posts the IRS Form 990. That is a free service to anyone. All you need to do is create a username and password to access GuideStar. We have a direct link into here so that when you identify a funder and you want to look up their 990, you can do so right from the GrantStation website. We also have questions that you might want to ask the funder, whether you ask them via email or you want to call them. Our CEO, Cynthia Adams, has written a guide of questions that are good questions that you can ask funders when you are thinking about applying to either a letter of inquiry or a full proposal to be submitted. So this is where you want to do all your additional research to continuing to vet those funders. And then we still have a few more parts of the website we want to show you in this time together. We have a very short amount of time so we're kind of trying to squeeze it all into one to give you a taste of what GrantStation can do for you. So Jeremy, let's take them up to those resources they can access in the public resource area. Oh, not a problem, Sarah. So as I mentioned earlier, we have two specific areas here. We have TrendTrack which is our blog section that we have as well as Pathfinder. And as I mentioned earlier, if you're interested in learning more about developing yourself in the Grant's area, you can use our Pathfinder website. And this is really developed and designed to help you develop your career path as a Grant's professional. You can browse through our library of resources which have focuses on Grant research, writing, and management, as well as strategic planning. We have an interactive Find Your Path tool which is really fun to use to really give yourself some customized curriculum for your learning plan. And in addition, we're also really interested in what's happening in the world, in the philanthropic world specifically. So under public resources, you can also find a direct link to our TrendTrack website. And this is where you can find information including our reports under state of Grant seeking, our blog entries which go up every week under GS Insights, and of course our podcast featuring yours truly which allows us to cover various trends in philanthropy as well as specific grant makers to address various issues. Now the most important thing to remember though is that when you're doing a search for funding for any kind of project, it's important to have a Grant strategy, a strategic approach using primary and secondary research, and Grant station's tools that I've shown you today really allows you to apply your time where it's most effective and efficient in your search for funding. So at this point, we have some time left I believe and I didn't know if we wanted to go ahead and deal with some questions. We do Jeremy. So I have a couple of questions I flagged that I know is probably on a number of people's mind. Stacey asked, how many people can access the service from one organization? I have a remote board member who helps with grant writing and searching. Can they access the database and information? Do you want me to feel that one Jeremy? Sarah you are the most qualified to feel that question. Okay. Well under our terms of agreement, our licensing agreement, it states one username and password per membership. However, we do understand that you might want to share this, your login credentials with another in your organization. And that's okay with us. You can share it with one other in your organization. However, if you're interested in multiple memberships and logins, you would just need to contact us directly for more information on that. So we have another good question here Jeremy. Hang on, we've got so many questions coming in. Oh sure. So Anne asked, what are the total number of grant, what are the total number of grantors that are in the GrantStation database and how does this compare to the number of funders in the Foundation Center's database? Well this is a question that comes up often and it's one of those apples-to-oranges comparisons. The big difference, and I mentioned this earlier in the tour, GrantStation only lists grant-making organizations that are accepting unsolicited requests or letters of inquiry. And every single grant-maker is actively accepting them. Whereas Foundation Center or any other service will have listings that go back, you know, tens or decades, tens of years, tens of years which is a decade, that could go back decades or maybe five to ten years. They may no longer be offering grants for that matter. Everything you find on GrantStation is actively accepting requests. So everything that you find here is what we call in the game. So it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison. And the number that we have fluctuates on a regular basis. Now last full count I had was roughly 10,000, but then that number changed. Within two days that number was then 12,000. Then the next day it dropped down to 9,000 because everything is constantly changing in our database which is why it's really imperative when you're doing your searches to save your search criteria and repeat the search. If you're doing your research now and you're going to apply in three months, that's not the best approach. Your best approach is to go ahead and do your research, find the grant-makers you want to apply for, and then go forward with them because things change very quickly especially in today's climate. So it's really important that you find the grant-maker who will accept your information and will fund your need today as opposed to spend your time chasing a grant-maker who may no longer even be offering money. Which brings me to a question that a number of folks asked Jeremy. They asked the difference between the Foundation Center and GrantStation. And Jeremy just highlighted the difference in that we list only those funders who are currently requesting proposals or letters of inquiry. You know, we also include the federal deadlines as well as state funding opportunity so you can do all your research in one place. It's imperative that you do your federal and state research as Jeremy mentioned earlier because you can state that when you then go to the private funder that you have indeed done your due diligence in your research. So Jeremy Karen asked, and I'm going to kind of thumbnail this, if we know in advance we're looking for fundings to assist with operational costs for an organization, go back down to the criteria we have listed because we do have where you can search for different kinds of support. So let's just talk about that for a minute because this is really powerful. So there it is, types of support. So if you're looking for those operations costs, you're looking for general operating support, you can click that. However, we have capacity building funds. So if you're looking for capacity building funders, you have that as well. If you're looking for just equipment and you really would like to isolate these, this is the perfect opportunity. You just click on equipment and it pulls up those funders who are supporting with equipment. There are matching funders, the matching grants program, there's all different types of support. So this column on the right where you've got all these different things that you can collect, you've got targeted populations if you're working with the aging or you're working with children. And Jeremy, I know we have a lot of organizations here and they've asked some questions so I'm just going to sum it up. We do have religious types of support. We do have where you can look up religious-based funders. You do have, oh it's not in types of support, it's in one of the other ones. Sorry, it's right here under type of grant record. There you are. You can click on religious. Now we don't always recommend searching if you're a faith-based organization under religious because there may be a lot of other opportunities there if you are serving the public such as I like to use the example of Habitat for Humanity which is a faith-based organization but they get their funding from, they get their funding from the federal government, from the state government and from private funders. So while you definitely want to look in there you also want to not check that box say if you're a food bank or building housing or doing anything in the social service area. So with that Jeremy I think we pretty much covered most of what folks are interested in. Susan are you there? I am. Thank you so much. Wow. Thank you for taking the time to answer all of those questions. And if you do see any more that pop in that you wish to answer there is still time. And while you're doing that I'm just going to take us through just a couple of slides and if we need to go back to the Grand Station site we can do that. But I wanted to ask everyone on this webinar to share with us one thing that you learned today or one thing that you might try to implement. So take a minute to do that and also as a quick reminder we do ask for your feedback at the end of this event for most of you as soon as you X out there will be a pop-up that comes up with a survey. We do ask that you complete the survey. This helps us know if we've met your expectations. And also you can provide us with corrective feedback and suggestions as to how we can improve our webinars both the content and the delivery. A couple of quick reminders. Again the special offer is happening on May 16th and 17th. If you go to info.techsoup.org slash Grand Station you can go ahead and plug in your email address and you will actually receive a reminder when the offer goes live on the 16th. But we want you to make sure you take advantage of that either for renewal or if it's your first time getting a Grand Station order. A couple of other things. We do have online courses that you can access. We've got lots of free courses in TechSoup courses and that's techsoup.course.tc slash catalog. You can look at the courses that are available. We also have other upcoming webinars and events. Next week we've got copywriting for the web, today's best practices. You can register for that at any time. These are all free. On the 25th we have combating nonprofit burnout and managing tech and email overload. And then we have one at the end of this month's libraries as innovation hubs, community driven design. So before I say thank you to Sarah and Jeremy, I want to make sure that if there are any other questions you guys would like to address we have about 4 minutes to do that. Well I would like to just add a comment. They're going by so quickly. It's hard for me to identify the person who said it but they said at times it seems very complicated and watching this Grand Station tour it makes it seem possible. And so that's the whole idea. You can do this. It takes time and it takes thoughtfulness but you have a lot of tools at your disposal to identify those funders who align most closely with your organization's mission as well. And it's always our pleasure to share this with you. So we're grateful that we had the opportunity. Jeremy? Yeah, Sarah did, oh Sarah. I'm done. Actually I also wanted to mention specifically under right proposals I've seen a lot of questions about well how do I do this, how do I do that, what's the best way to do this. Right proposals getting started is an excellent guide and we only have so much time so we can't cover everything. But this is a 12 part article series written by our CEO that goes into everything you need to do about writing a proposal. What to collect, how to collect, what questions to ask, what's the best way to do it, and then has downloadable samples of the budget, the operating plan, the board of directors, what to do with the administration and staff. And in addition to that we also have I really can't stop saying how much I like this, it's the full grant proposal. And it breaks down every single aspect of that grant proposal and what you need to do, what you need to consider, and this is the nice thing, throughout the entire article how your relationship with the grant maker is important when you are writing the proposal because it's better to have some relationship even if it's a matter of just calling up someone and saying, hi, I'm so-and-so with X organization. I'm interested in applying for this particular grant. What can you tell me about your organization, etc., etc. Having just one, anything that separates you from every other 30 page proposal that comes on their desk is going to give you that leg up. And this is something that's covered in all of our articles that we have here on GrantStation that's available to you as a member. Great. Thank you both so much. A quick reminder to everyone that we do send out an email notifying you when the archive is available. We do update our GrantStation tours on our website so that you can view this exact tour that we've recorded today. It usually comes out in a few days. I'm going to try to produce this today so you guys can have access to the recording. And I see a couple questions came in about TechSoup courses, just not to confuse the two. Our TechSoup courses is something run by TechSoup here. And those courses, the majority of those are free. You just need to create an account to get in to access those. So I think at this point I want to thank Jeremy and Sarah. I've watched this tour probably four times. And each time it gets better, and I also feel more confident with the information I learn from Jeremy and Sarah. So I'm better able to both listen and answer questions when I'm able, when I'm not chatting out other things. So thank you both. And we are so privileged to have GrantStation as a partner and to offer this to our nonprofits. We hope you take advantage of the special coming up next week. And if you have any other questions, you can feel free to email us at webinars at TechSoup.org. And we can find the answer for you, or we can refer you to GrantStation. So thanks Jeremy and Sarah. And of course a special thanks to our sponsor of webinars, ReadyTalk. And most importantly, thank you to you who've spent an hour of your time with us. We know in nonprofit land an hour is a lot of time, and it is your most valuable asset. So thank you so much. That's it for today. We look forward to seeing you on our next webinar. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.


Coming to you from RGIS Studios, I am Anicia Antoine and this is your media news brief. The government of St. Lucia has officially launched the Canal's resort development in China. The real estate investment project is being undertaken by Caribbean Galaxy Real Estate Ltd. Minister for Commerce, Industry, Investment, Enterprise Development and Consumer Affairs Honourable Bradley Felix described the meeting as a productive one. The five-star hotels will form the main hub of the New Luxe Resort and residential community at the Canal's estate on the island's southeast coast. Together, the two hotels will comprise 330 rooms along with an adjacent real estate component with 380 residential units. The two hotels will include E-Trees, bars, conference centres, a spa, children's clubs and entertainment areas. The project, which was first announced in 2017, is slated to break ground later this year. In an effort to build the country's capacity to respond to natural disasters, the US ambassador to Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean and the OECS, presented two satellite phones to the government of St. Lucia. Minister with responsibility for foreign affairs, Honourable Sierra Flood Borbara, expressed gratitude to the US government on behalf of the government and people of St. Lucia. Ambassador, her Excellency Linda Tavialatela, informed that a drill will be done to ensure that the phones are able to transmit a good signal. The two satellite phones were distributed to the National Emergency Management Agency and the Office of the Prime Minister. Since 2007, the government of the Republic of China, Taiwan has been working with the government of St. Lucia through the constituency development programme to improve the livelihoods of the St. Lucians by constructing, rehabilitating and maintaining infrastructural facilities across all communities in the country. Under the programme, projects like flood mitigation, drainage, soil stabilisation, community access roads and school facilities are all implemented bringing benefit to the people of St. Lucia. Recently, the government of the Republic of China, Taiwan, disbursed funds under the programme for the second phase of 2018 and the first phase of 2019. Ambassador, his Excellency Douglas Shen, says since inception over 2,400 projects have been completed and 25,000 jobs created under the programme. This year, the programme will place more focus on projects that are centred on people development. This has been your media news brief. Thank you for watching.