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Corporate giving grows in Central/Eastern European
By MAGGIE I. JARUZEL
Elementary schoolchildren in the Czech Republic who are bullied have an unusual ally — the country’s largest private telephone company.
Employees of Telefonica O2 don’t answer frantic phone calls for help. Instead, the company supports an anti-bullying program through its nonprofit funding arm, the O2 Foundation.
“We learned that bullying was happening a lot inside and outside of school, so our purpose was to inform the public, teachers and students about the problem. Until then, it had been taboo to talk about bullying,” said Jitka Volkova, manager of the O2 Foundation.
“We know we cannot stop it all, but we want to help teachers learn how to recognize it, minimize it and teach them ways to deal with it.”
While many national and multinational companies now doing business in the Czech Republic donate money to projects that help children, none had focused on bullying, even though teachers identified it as a problem. Consequently, the O2 Foundation connected with an expert in the field two years ago to develop and implement a comprehensive program called Minimization of Bullying, Volkova said.
 Corporate donors in Central/Eastern Europe support a variety of programs to improve life for residents. |
The Eurotel Foundation (later renamed O2 Foundation) had been created in 2002 after owners decided to have the corporation’s various charitable activities managed and funded by one administrative source. When Eurotel was registered with the government, it was one of the first corporate foundations in the Czech Republic.
Since then, the foundation has been highlighted nationally for its many projects that display corporate social responsibility and the company became a founding member of the Corporate Club of the Czech Donors Forum, said Pavlina Kalousova. She is executive director of the Prague-based forum, which is an association of private grantmakers, foundations and corporate funders that promotes effective philanthropy.
In recent years, the number of corporate funders in the Czech Republic has grown — and so have the amounts of money they donate to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to address local and national societal needs.
For example, in 2005 — the latest year for which figures are available from the nation’s Ministry of Finance — companies received tax incentives for donating $100 million to NGOs in the Czech Republic, a country of 10.2 million people.
But the growth of corporate giving is not limited to one country, Kalousova said, because figures are climbing throughout Central/Eastern Europe (CEE).
“We’ve got the numbers from donors’ forums in each country to prove it,” she said.
In response to the expansion of corporate giving, the leaders of four donors’ associations — in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia — created an informal group in 2005 called the Central and Eastern European Network for Responsible Giving (CEENERGI)
The network, established as a nonprofit project of the Czech Donors Forum, aims to increase the number of corporate donors throughout the region and improve their effectiveness. The forum has received $494,400 in Mott Foundation support since 1998, of which $213,000 has been earmarked for CEENERGI operations and activities.
CEENERGI expanded in 2006 to include donor forums in Hungary, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. As a result, members from the eight countries share information, including strategies about how companies can develop charitable projects and statistical data about corporate giving. In addition, CEENERGI provides consulting services for corporate donors throughout the region.
The local conditions and the way corporate donors operate in the region are very similar, Kalousova said.
“The value that donors’ forums bring to corporations operating in Central and Eastern Europe is that we know what works here and what doesn’t,” Kalousova said.
“Often times, what works in the U.K. [United Kingdom] will never work here. But if we go to Bulgaria and say that it works in the Czech Republic, then local corporations will believe that it can work in Bulgaria, too.
“Countries in our region of CEE are similar because there’s a mistrust of governments and public institutions in general. It’s the attitude of many people, which is somehow still left from communism.”
Until more than 15 years ago, governments did everything for residents in the region. As a result, charitable giving to social and environmental causes, along with volunteerism, are relatively new concepts in each country. So is the notion of tax-incentives for individuals and corporations.
However, the Czech Republic has been far ahead of other countries in CEE in these areas.
Lenka Ilanovska, executive director of the Slovak Donors’ Forum in Bratislava, Slovakia, is grateful for the guidance the Czech Donors Forum gave in developing CEENERGI. She also is proud of the data collection system the group created so information, such as the amount of money specific multinational companies are donating in each country, can be shared.
“We can say, ‘Look, the statistics show that you are giving 5 percent to NGOs in the Czech Republic, but you are only giving 3.5 percent to NGOs in Bulgaria and only 1.5 percent in Slovakia,’” Ilanovska said.
The figures also can be used to applaud specific companies, she said. Annually, each CEENERGI participant publicly announces the names of the country’s top corporate givers as a way to recognize those who have done well, and also to encourage a bit of friendly competition between companies to do better the following year.
Corporate donors in CEE rarely get publicity for their good works even though CEENERGI’s research is solid and its numbers are accurate. Instead, if the media do report about a project that a corporation has supported — either with money or volunteers, or both — they will give details about the project, but use a general term to describe who donated the money for it, such as “this project was funded by a medical company,” said Volkova of the O2 Foundation.
While the lack of publicity is frustrating for corporations, it also has a negative impact on society overall, CEENERGI members said, because residents need to hear news stories explaining how local communities are addressing social and environmental challenges.
In response to the lack of media coverage, CEENERGI members have sponsored workshops for local and national print and broadcast journalists. They bring them together with international journalists from the BBC and CNN to learn the value of reporting on social and environmental projects and how to report on a story about a corporate donor’s project without making it sound like a public relations piece.
CEENERGI members often serve as bridges — helping corporations connect with appropriate NGO partners that are working in specific areas that companies want to support, such as education, sports or environment, said Vessela Gertcheva, director of the Bulgarian Donors’ Forum. She said both sides win — corporations reach their giving goals and NGOs receive the financial help they need to fulfill their missions.
The corporate members of the Bulgarian Donors’ Forum kept busy in early 2007 learning about national tax structures from their counterparts in the region. Bulgaria’s Ministry of Finance asked the forum to recommend ways to create tax incentives for companies that make financial donations to NGOs.
“This is the first time the Ministry of Finance has invited input,” Gertcheva said.
“I am certain they never would have been invited to submit a proposal if they were not seen as corporations that are socially responsible and if they were not part of a group like the donors forum.”