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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Growing Ambition in a Shrinking Space: Hungary’s Community Foundations after the Election

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Hungarian CF Support Program: Ready for bad weather

Tamás Scsaurszki

It may come as a surprise, but the ambitions of Hungarian community foundations are growing while the space for civic action is shrinking in Hungary; often times Hungary feels like ’the Syria’ of Europe, a kind of battleground for ideologies and political superpowers; there is a heavy price we pay for it, but still, it is not impossible to work on improving communities!

Read the whole article here.

 

 

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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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A LITTLE TALE ABOUT THE ECFI STUDY TRIP TO THE UK

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by Alejandro Hernandéz-Renner,  Director, Fundacion Maimona, Spain

This is a short story written as an aide-memoire of the experiences gathered while participating in the CF study visit to the UK organized by the ECFI (European Community Foundation Initiative) network. It is not intended to constitute a formal or technical report, but rather a very brief personal record of those four days (5–8 September 2017).

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Have you ever heard of Vinnytsia?

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Beata Hirt, Executive Director, Healthy City Community Foundation, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia

„No, never“,  I would have answered three months ago.

Everything has started with a phone call from Boris Strečanský[1].  He asked if we would consider being a partner with the Ukrainian Podilska Hromada Community Foundation in the CF2CF Exchange program supported by the European Community Foundation Initiative (ECFI). We agreed, but to tell the truth, we were not that excited.  And this would soon change!

Meeting in the office of the Podilska Hromada Community Foundation

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Presenting myself, and sharing a paper on CF, its operational definition, and local development, in Spain + Portugal

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by Alejandro Hernández-Renner

Hello, dear colleagues,

I am very honored to share with you a few lines about issues in southern Europe and some theoretic stuff that might be of interest. I serve as CEO at a foundation which lies in western Spain, region Extremadura, called Fundación Maimona (www.maimona.org).

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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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