Author Archive:
Nilda Bullain
A view from the lakeside
The Rockefeller Foundation people knew what they were doing when they invited us to Bellagio Center on Lake Como with its sunny evergreens and breathtaking panorama. The place is so serene that you have no …
What have we learned?
The moon has a shadow side but since we always see only the bright side we could only guess what the other side was like and we had to go on a journey to outer …
Can government be a ‘replacement’?
When exiting a country, foreign donors inevitably create a vacuum in funding for certain types of organizations and certain areas of NGO work. Several contributors to this issue of Alliance emphasize that it is important …
Hungary’s National Civil Fund – Is good will good enough?
As I write, just over 1,600 NGOs in Hungary have elected 12 civil society representatives to the Governing Council of the National Civil Fund (NCF). This is the first time NGOs have elected representatives in …
New thinking within old structures
The government of Hungary is proposing to set up a National Civil Fund that will finance NGOs’ core operational costs – and they would like a legitimate representative of Hungarian civil society to be available …
Capacity-building revisited – what do Western consultants really have to offer?
There is one sentence in the weaponry of NGO activists in the non-North-Atlantic part of the world that will hush even the most determined American or British development professional. The sentence goes: ‘You don’t understand …
Towards Financial Self-Reliance: A handbook on resource mobilization for civil society organizations in the south
Such a title should appeal to any civil society organization. We desperate non-profit managers are always keen to know the magic recipe to find the sources that will provide us with money for the next …
Foreign funding in Hungary – what worked and what didn’t
Although foreign support has never been a major factor in the total income of the Hungarian non-profit sector compared to other CEE countries, Western funding has played a significant role in the development of the …
