I like sharing my acquisition skills with others because I have personally experienced how wonderful it is to see your own dream projects come true
Founder/ director Ilse van Lamoen:
With Zinder, I hope to challenge the prevailing image of fundraising as a ‘dry’ financial-administrative profession. By my experience, fundraisers first and foremost need to be creative. We help people with good project ideas achieving their dreams, which is extremely fulfilling. I enjoy working with innovators, that is: organisations or individuals planning to do something unique, or aspiring to test or upscale new approaches.
I have proven my fundraising skills as the former director of MIND, a Nigerian media advocacy organisation that I co-founded in 2010. My acquisition efforts paid off soon: our first funders granted a considerable sum to our first innovative project FEMSCRIPT, while MIND was a brand-new organisation without a track record. Under my leadership, MIND acquired funding from a wide variety of donors and partners, including UNICEF (Films on Violence Against Children), the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (WATCH), Voices for Change / UkAid (Radio Capacity Assessment), the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Daughters of the Niger Delta), Search for Common Ground / European Union (Tomorrow is a New Day), Cordaid (FEMSCRIPT, FAST) and the Nigerian government (GWIN films).
Thanks to their project support, MIND was able to achieve much more than I could have imagined. Our first film Daughters of the Niger Delta - filmed by young women from the region - has been screened at film festivals around the world and won several awards. Our sensitisation films for UNICEF are still used as discussion tools in schools across Nigeria to reduce violence against children. And our WATCH project - which amplified the public voices of slum residents - delivered tangible improvements in the daily living conditions of people living in urban poverty in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja .
When my family and I moved to the Netherlands - after a 12-year stay in West Africa - I started working as a freelancer in vision/strategy development, fundraising, and strategic communication. This sparked the birth of Zinder. I gain much energy from conceptualising and concretising innovative ideas, exploring funding possibilities and bringing visions and opportunities together (through tailored proposals for specific donors). My competence in these areas is quantifiable: 83% of all project proposals I developed over the course of my career have been fully or partially granted funding.
I enjoy sharing my acquisition skills with others because I have personally experienced how wonderful it is to see your own dream projects come true.
llse van Lamoen studied political science (MA - International Relations, cum laude) and filmmaking (MA - Documentary Directing, almost completed). She received the C. Halkes Thesis Prize for her graduation thesis “Grootmachten, grenzen en grondslagen”. The first documentary she directed, Daughters of the Niger Delta, won 6 international film festival awards. More details about Ilse's career can be found on her LinkedIn profile.
