Author Archives: Boris Strečanský

Call for participation – Community Foundation Study Visit to Latvia

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Join a group of 12 European community foundation practitioners to collectively explore the experience and practice of community philanthropy of our Latvian colleagues. 

The CF study visit is a one-week long, intensive learning program that brings a group of community foundation (CF) and CF support organization (CFSO) practitioners and thinkers from different European countries to one country to meet and interact with several community foundations for the purpose of mutual learning and reflection. The host country of the 2018 edition of the ECFI Community Foundation Study Visit will be Latvia and its partner in organizing the study visit is the Community Foundation Movement of Latvia.

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The Resilience Laboratory

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Come to Bucharest and join your colleagues from community foundations in Romania and Europe to explore what resilience means to our work and us.

With the ambition to collectively explore existing practices and approaches of community foundations in Europe that strengthen the resilience of communities and the capacity for dialogue, the Association for Community Relations (ARC) and ECFI (European Community Foundation Initiative) are preparing a two day peer learning event “Resilience Laboratory” on 19-20 April in Bucharest. Its purpose is to strengthen the capacity of community foundations to understand and address broader issues and better define the idea of community leadership in European context. (click on the picture on the left for more info).

 

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Testing Peer Learning through Relationship Building

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Boris Strečanský

In my new role in the European Community Foundation Initiative (ECFI), which has been launched earlier this year, I am thinking about ways, how to organize a space that would encourage and nurture peer learning among CFs or CF Support Organizations (CFSOs).

The peer learning idea is not new, maybe it is as old as mankind, as it is collaboration that made us what we are, as a human species.

It is the idea that people, colleagues with similar or equal work, status and/or practice, can learn from each other (skills, knowledge) when they are actively helping each other or when they are engaged together in common experience and reflect on that experience together.

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First National Conference of Community Foundations in Hungary

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by Boris Strečanský

The National CF Support Program Közös Alapon organizes the First National Conference of CFs in Hungary on March 18-19, 2016 in Budapest. The conference will provide space for presentations of community foundation practitioners from Hungary and Slovakia as well as for discussing perspectives on the social environment, situation and opportunities of civil initiatives in Hungary today provided by leading social development and research professionals. More information on the Conference can be retrieved here.

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A new project strengthens the community foundation movement in Europe

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Berlin, 17. Dezember 2015: The European Community Foundation Initiative (ECFI) is being launched in January 2016. As an umbrella initiative for community foundations it will be active throughout Europe, working to consolidate the loose network of community foundations in the Europe. It is conceived as a long-term project and has been allocated a budget of almost a half million euros for the first two years and is financed by a number of foundations, including the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation based in the U.S., the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Körber Foundation.

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Community Foundations in Europe

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Dear friends,

here is a short  movie on CFs in Europe which is based on my presentation at the pre-conference session of the UK Community Foundations Conference in Belfast on September 23, 2015. It is an overview of my thoughts that I prepared to share with partly international and partly UK audience to open a session on CFs in Europe. It is a brief presentation due to lack of synthetic information on CFs in Europe which is contrast to more information and data when looking at particular countries or sub-regions.

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Some answers and more questions

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 Since the last study trip and then reading a provocative but truthful reflection paper from Jiri Barta I have in my mind two disturbing questions – is more philanthropy our best (and only) way to sustainability of our communities and second – do we have a courage to do it ?

Let me now walk you through some examples of our attempts to raise money from local sources and what we have learnt in our foundation.

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News about CFs in Hungary

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But, will anybody be interested….???

This is the question put by my colleague Ivan at our staff retreat in July 2014 – reflecting the uncertainty that he, and all of us, felt about our chances of finding local people motivated to start community foundations in Hungary …

Tamas Scsaurszki wrote a story of last two years of efforts of his team in nurturing the CF concept. As the story is longer than a typical blog post, by clicking on the picture you get to the full article.

kozop team

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20 Years of CFs in the CEE: Short Movie

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Can 20 years of experience with nurturing civic engagement through the vehicles of community foundation be condensed into four minutes?

First of the movies made during the recent CF Study Trip to Slovakia attempts to do that, thanks to the C.S. Mott Foundation and Mihai Leaha / Tribafilm.

http://youtu.be/_fJ7NsN3FBU

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About Blogging Platform at cfpracticelab.org

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The CF Practice Lab web site has opened its blogging functionality. It allows anybody, who is signed in to the website (has a login and password) to post blogs and attachments or to post comments to blogs. This means that all registered users of the website now have another role – that of contributor!

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