[Editor's Note: This is a companion article to the 2007 Annual Report]
By MAGGIE I. JARUZEL
Pawel Lukasiak has spent years promoting community foundations, a still relatively new and somewhat difficult-to-explain concept in his home country of Poland.
For Lukasiak, the easiest way to describe these philanthropic institutions is to tell the stories of real lives that have been changed for the better because of them.
“We can tell the stories of young people who are making biking trails or talk about those people who have started participating in their community’s affairs,” he said through an interpreter.
As director of the Warsaw-based
Academy for the Development of Philanthropy, Lukasiak has been sharing both quantitative and qualitative results since 1998, when the academy and the country’s first community foundation were established.
Simply put, community foundations are independent philanthropic organizations that collect, manage and distribute funds from local donors to address, among other things, local social, educational and cultural needs.
The concept has spread throughout Poland, thanks largely to the academy. To date, it has helped develop 20 community foundations in that country. In 2007, with a three-year, $600,000 Mott Foundation grant, the academy started a regional fund to support the development of community foundations in three additional countries: Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
Mott support helps ensure independent funding for the development of community foundations in those countries, including transforming 13 current Polish local grantmaking organizations into fully developed community foundations.
In all, Mott has made six grants totaling $1.7 million to the academy since 1998, and more support has been projected to help strengthen the community foundation field in the region.
But support to organizations such as the academy is shifting from major international funders — including Mott, the Open Society Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation — to more local and regional funders, including the Trust for Civil Society in Central & Eastern Europe, and others.
The trend is a positive sign, Lukasiak says, because it shows that the indigenous philanthropic sector is continuously gaining strength, and making non-governmental organizations (NGOs) less dependent upon funding from outside the region. Also, as more international funders leave the region, community foundations can serve as vehicles of local financial support to help fill any funding gaps.
Several practices associated with community foundations — such as fundraising and building endowments, which is raising funds to create a pool of money for future needs — were unfamiliar ideas to citizens in Poland and other former communist states, Lukasiak says.
In response, the academy published Poland’s first two books about fundraising and endowments. They were written specifically for NGOs and community foundations following the nation’s move toward democracy, he says.
While raising funds is necessary, Lukasiak adds, it is equally essential for community foundations to help rebuild a culture of citizen participation, and also to try to restore the public’s trust in institutions.
“In socialism — what Westerners call ‘communism’ — the state is large and overprotective of its citizens and restrains space for civic engagement,” he said.
“Because of this, the role of people to engage in local activities was very much weakened as we were transitioning from a command-and-control government to a free-market economy.”
As citizens throughout Central/Eastern Europe begin to accumulate financial assets and become more affluent, it’s important for them to learn how to share their wealth, Lukasiak says.
Although countries in the region were under autocratic rule for decades, he likes to remind citizens that their societies had a rich history of philanthropic endeavors before World War II, especially in the area of education. Consequently, most community foundations in Poland are quite successful at developing school scholarships, Lukasiak adds.
But in order to obtain overall success, Lukasiak says, community foundations must remain independent, be self-sustaining and know how to identify accurately their local needs. To help community foundations do this, the academy created a support strategy, which, among other things, includes a self-evaluation tool that enables them to identify their institution’s specific strengths, weaknesses and challenges.
“We want community foundations to develop and grow their human, social and financial assets,” Lukasiak said. “We want their growth to be solid and long-term.”