Education grant applications paused

Education
1

Hello,
We wanted to share some news regarding the current status of education grants with NEAR Foundation. The following message was sent to anyone who has submitted a grant and is awaiting a response. For now, all education grants are on hold.
We hope to have clear guidelines on new education grant submissions as soon as possible!

Hello,
You are receiving this communication because you’ve recently applied for an Education grant at NEAR Foundation and we would like to provide an update on our status.

During the last year, we’ve funded over 50 projects from 15 different countries and distributed $2.7m worth of NEAR in the ecosystem. Projects ranged in size and some were really amazing contributions to the NEAR community. The success rate was roughly 50%.

At this time, we’ve decided to pause for a few weeks to evaluate the current process in an effort to improve it as we move forward. Unfortunately, this means that we will not be funding any projects at the moment. We understand this is disappointing news for you and your efforts, and we sincerely apologize for the delays in our responses.

As you know NEAR Foundation is committed to supporting open-source projects that generate public goods for the community, and give other ecosystem participants the opportunity to learn from, and build on your work. We hope to have clear guidelines for new education specific grant proposals by January 2023.

In the meantime, please be aware that our primary channels for grant funding are still open. You may choose to submit your project through a different channel. Learn more at Get Funding – NEAR Protocol

We truly appreciate your patience and understanding during this time.

Sincerely,
Education Team, NEAR Foundation

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It’s bad the suspension of support for educational activities.
I wish Near Edu to come to beautiful places with a better program with the new year.

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Very sad and concerning to see what seems to amount to a coordinated attempt at pulling all community funding, specially in the key areas of growth, at the precise time when it matters most.

I would strongly encourage the NEAR Foundation team to review and restart funding, particularly to core areas such as Education, as soon as possible.

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Thank you for your feedback, and we definitely understand the concern. A reminder we are only pausing grants for now so we can better define the process for applicants and for us internally. We hope to be back to funding education initiatives very soon!

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Thank you for the comment, we hope to have an improved program as soon as possible!

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NEAR Edu has done an excellent job so far, and I only expect great things to come in the future! People, sometimes you need a pause to evaluate, organize and re-assess priorities in order to come up with better processes and a more focused vision and goals. By the way, great job on the new and improved self-paced NCD certification @bianca.momand.

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Education is a fundamental element within the ecosystem, thanks to these educational programs many of us have been trained and actively integrated into the development of products in the NEAR ecosystem, we hope the return of support for Education, with rules, vision and improved conditions. However, we must recognize the excellent result for this 2022. Let’s hope for a much more successful 2023

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Education grants paused but the NEAR Foundation just delegated 46m+ NEAR to anonymous validators with 100% fee…?

We need more transparency and accountability