Grants to USA, Canada, and International NGOs, IHEs, and nonprofit and for-profit organizations for projects to assist countries exiting from a period of armed conflict to transition to peace. Applicants are advised that required registrations may take several weeks to complete. Funding is intended for projects that support forensic anthropology and transitional justice processes around the globe.

Proposals must take an integrated, locally owned, and victim-centered approach in designing, strengthening, and/or promoting transitional justice processes and forensic anthropology assistance aimed at encouraging broad community ownership and sustainability.  Program strategies should fit the appropriate cultural, judicial, legal, and economic context(s) of the local context and clearly articulate and address the needs and priorities of victims and their families.  In addition, gender considerations must be integrated throughout program design.

Proposals should address two or more of the following areas:

• Building local forensic anthropological capacities to investigate and prosecute cases of forced disappearances and gross human rights violations through exhuming mass graves; collecting and analyzing DNA samples; identifying victims’ remains; preserving evidence and documentation for a range of transitional justice processes; and/or facilitating increased national, regional, and international awareness through coordination between victims’ family associations and the broader NGO human rights community, including through outreach to key opinion makers, policy makers, and the public at large;
• Strengthening the capacity of local civil society to document human rights violations aimed at pursuing truth, justice, and reconciliation, including through oral histories, forensic evidence, legal documentation focused on criminal accountability, memorialization efforts, and archiving, which may include the use of innovative and accessible secure documentation tools;
• Supporting locally led advocacy, educational initiatives, and/or memorialization, archiving, and additional truth-telling activities to address: (1) historical memory and legacies of large-scale human rights abuses; and, (2) the prevention of local conflict and mass atrocities;
• Facilitating the empowerment of victims, survivors, and their families through transitional justice programs that will account for the individual and collective needs of different groups of victims and survivors. Program approaches may include, but are not limited to:  empowering victims and survivors, particularly among indigenous communities, women, and other vulnerable groups to effectively participate in formal and informal reparative justice processes; fostering coordination, skill-building, and mentorship among diverse civil society actors to better integrate victims and their families into national and local justice and accountability efforts; and, pursuing a trauma-informed approach to truth-telling, memorialization, and documentation prioritizing victims’ and survivors’ active and informed consent, privacy, agency, and physical and emotional safety.