The Sustainable NGO Financing Project (SNFP) for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was an effort to encourage and assist regional non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in identify long-term financial resources to ensure the sustainability of programme activities. The SNFP was a collaborative effort of six organizations (see main website): Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC); Lotos Foundation (Czech Republic), Partners for Democratic Change (Slovakia), Civil Society Development Foundation (Hungary), Centre for Nonprofit Management (Slovenia), and Nonprofit Enterprise and Self-sustainability Team (NESsT). The initiative is a response to problems posed by local NGO dependency on international donor support and a current lack of local public and private philanthropic resources in CEE to meet the growing needs of NGOs. As NGOs in the CEE region continue to grow in number and size, begin to operate more professionally and expand and diversify their activities, there is an increasingly urgent need to address the very basic question of how to financially sustain their valuable efforts. The question of how to achieve "sustainable" NGO financing has always confounded NGO professionals, fundraisers, donors and policy analysts. It represents perhaps one of the greatest obstacles for the non-profit sector. NGOs are constantly faced with the limitations of public and private philanthropy, as well as institutional form and capacity limitations toward gaining access to adequate resources. In CEE, for example, a large majority (roughly 75 percent) of nearly 2,000 environmental NGOs responding to a survey conducted by the REC in 1996, already characterized their financial situation as "very poor," "poor," or "unstable." The financing of NGOs in CEE is a particularly critical issue, as some foreign governments and private funding institutions have begun to reduce - or altogether eliminate - foreign aid to the region. Most predominantly, in the "more developed" CEE countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia), future commitments of resources for NGOs are waning. Whether from lack of institutional capacity and awareness, or a simple disdain for market-based solutions, NGOs in the region have typically overlooked opportunities to take advantage of their own "entrepreneurial" potential to generate resources. Meanwhile, however, the continued privatisation and development of domestic markets in many CEE countries indicate concrete growth and substantive potential. Governments are stabilising, market-oriented institutions are emerging, and local business activity is rapidly increasing and gaining international exposure. Numerous NGOs have already begun to employ creative and potentially lucrative "enterprises" to capitalise on these opportunities. The SNFP team uses the term "self-financing" to refer to strategies used by NGOs to generate some of their own resources to further their mission. Types of self-financing activities include both mission-related and non-related ventures: membership dues; fees for services; product sales; use of "soft" assets (e.g., licensing agreements, patents, copyrights, etc.); use of "hard" assets (e.g., rental of under-utilised equipment, real estate, etc.); ancillary business ventures; and investment dividends. The launch of Planning for Sustainability (funded by the PHARE Partnership Programme) in early 2000 was an attempt to better understand the preconditions and opportunities for fostering NGO self-financing strategies in the CEE region. For more information about our activities in this area please write to: NGO Support Programme The Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe Ady Endre ut 9-11. 2000 Szentendre, Hungary Tel: (36-26) 504-000 Fax: (36-26) 311-294 E-mail: NGOSupport@rec.org

Sustainable NGO Financing Project (main website) NGOs Awarded Venture Start up Grants Planning for Sustainability: Supporting NGO Self-financing Ventures (116-page 1.1-Mbyte PDF file)