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European Foundation Centre
May 17, 2009
European Foundation Centre
Immigration Issues Draw Attention From Grant Makers
One backdrop to the conference was the topic of immigration in Europe, and in Italy in particular.
Last week, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government continued its crackdown on illegal immigration, making an arrangement with Libya to deport migrants to Libya before they arrive on Italian shores.
Those actions have been met by dismay and anger by human-rights activists in Italy and elsewhere.
The controversy was evident at the European Foundation Centre’s conference, when, during the opening plenary, Giorgio Napolitano, president of the Italian Republic, spoke about the dangers of xenophobia and intolerance.
That sentiment was underscored two days later at the conference’s closing session, where Emílio Rui Vilar, the newly elected chair of the European Foundation Centre, read a statement on behalf of conference participants that Europeans must work together to defend the human rights of immigrants.
The statement, which was met with enthusiastic applause from foundation officials in the audience, said: “It is with great regret that we witness the emergence of a climate in Italy, which is symptomatic of a general trend throughout Europe, which leads to measures relating to undocumented migrants that undermine people’s basic human rights….”
“We recognize that migration is a complex and challenging issue for all European member states…. We strongly encourage the governments of all member states to work individually, together and with the institutions of the European Union to build a framework for addressing migration in ways that truly respect the dignity of all human beings as defined in the European Convention on Human Rights.”
— Marty Michaels
European Foundation Centre
Coping With the Recession: Grant Makers Consider Options
Like their counterparts in the United States, grant makers in Europe are also wrestling with how best to carry out their missions during a global recession.
At one session, grant makers from Belgium, Denmark, and elsewhere described their experiences as their assets have fallen.
Speakers explored options in the current economic climate, including mergers, spending all their assets to help meet immediate needs, and increased collaboration across borders.
Luc Tayart de Borms, managing director of the King Baudouin Foundation, in Brussels, said that his foundation — which plans to spend $47-million this year — has decided to spend that sum every year through 2011, but that he knows doing so could eventually dig into the fund’s endowment.
“We have set aside cash for three years of expenses, but we will have to also consider given scenarios, and work with them,” said Mr. Tayart.
And when it comes to dealing with the crisis constructively, Nicolas Borsinger, executive director of the Pro Victimis Foundation, in Geneva, said too many small, poorly equipped, and inefficient funds operate in Europe.
So just as nonprofit groups are sometimes told by grant makers to consider mergers, Mr. Borsinger said that the possibility should also be an option for struggling organizations of any type.
Mr. Tayart reminded his colleagues that foundations have an “ethical obligation” to not merely perpetuate their assets, but rather ensure support for international and other critical needs.
“We have to show that we are there and sensitive to the needs of society.”
— Marty Michaels
May 16, 2009
European Foundation Centre
Legal Barriers Present Significant Hurdles for European Foundations
More than $100-million worth of grants probably don’t get made each year because of legal barriers that make it hard for foundations in one European country to award money in another one, according to a study released at the meeting.
Some 110,000 foundations operate in Europe, according to the study conducted by Helmut Anheier, academic director of the Centre for Social Investment, in Germany, who presented the findings, and others.
To make it easier for those foundations to make grants across borders, the European Foundation Centre, and other philanthropy advocates, have been pushing for a law that would remove most of the legal difficulties.
The process of drafting and adopting such a law has been fraught with concerns as to how it would be carried out, exactly how it would be phrased, and whether it would even be relevant. Of particular concern is how the differences in tax treatment of foundations in various countries would work.
Marjut Leskinen, a policy officer at the European Commission, noted in a panel discussion here that the statute would have to be approved by the commission’s 27 member states.
Said Ms. Leskinen: “We can’t twist their arm to make them accept it.”
May 15, 2009
European Foundation Centre
Promoting Social Innovation in the Middle East and North Africa
A session on social entrepreneurship in the Arab world highlighted the work of the Synergos Institute’s work with its new Arab World Social Innovators Program.
George Khalaf, director of the Middle East and North Africa programs run by Synergos, reported on the program’s experiences since it was created in October 2007. It is the organization’s first formal foray into that region.
Since then, 22 “social innovators” from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and the Palestinian territories have received money and management assistance to help them carry out and expand existing community-development and social-justice projects.
Mr. Khalaf said the 22 grant recipients were chosen from among 200 applicants, about half of whom were women. He said that he was disappointed that only four women received the money, but that he hoped women in the Arab world would benefit through the work of participants in the program.
One of the recipients, Ali Abu Awwad, a Palestinian activist, spoke on the panel. Mr. Awwad began Al-Tariq (the Way), a group in the Palestinian territories that incorporates the teaching of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi on non-violent resistance and promotes dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.
Mr. Awwad told pertinent parts of his life story, including his experience growing up in a refugee camp and learning that an Israeli soldier had killed his brother at a checkpoint near his village. Also, Mr. Awwad himself was shot in the leg by an Israeli settler and spent four years in prison during the first intifada.
After these losses, he said he started out “with a victim mentality.” But his mindset changed, he said: “It’s easy to grow up with hatred. But ultimately it’s poisoning your body, mind, and life. “
Mr. Awwad spoke to the difficulties of working with a nonprofit group that advocates nonviolence in a region rife with deep ethnic, political, and social enmities, and the challenge of “building a social movement without hatred, without violence.”
He also works closely with the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a grass-roots group of bereaved families who have lost family members to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promote reconciliation as an alternative to continued violence in the region.
The Oslo accords and other peace efforts have yet to include community members, said Mr. Awwad, and that must change if the situation is to evolve.
“Peace will be based on inclusion,” he said, “when the killing of every human being is a crime.”
European Foundation Centre
Venture Philanthropy Grows More Popular in Europe
The terms “venture philanthropy” and “social entrepreneurship” continue to gain greater coinage in Europe, and one conference session presented case studies of such efforts in Estonia and Germany.
Artur Taevere, managing director of the Good Deed Foundation, in Tallinn, Estonia, discussed his organization’s effort to create “Youth for School,” a program that deploys outstanding college graduates to teach in schools in impoverished neighborhoods, much like Teach for America does in the United States.
“Why would some of the university graduates go to teach in some of Estonia’s worst schools?” he asked. “What is the incentive?”
In his group’s case, the Ministry of Education endorsed the idea, and the program has proved to be a good fit both with the young teachers and students.
But it hasn’t been easy, says Mr. Taevere. “We’ve had to focus on achieving very tangible results, and it’s been a challenge to find partners who fit well with Good Deed both as a grant maker and as a partner.”
Peter W. Heller, executive director of the Canopus Foundation, a family foundation in Freiburg, Germany, also told of his fund’s efforts looking for projects that teamed “market intelligence with high social impact.”
For example, his foundation’s “A Solar World for All” project seeks to make solar energy affordable to the estimated two billion people without access to electricity, and Canopus is working on the effort with Ashoka, in Arlington, Va., and other groups. Mr. Heller said that the project has already brought down the costs of solar panels needed to provide electricity for poor families in Brazil by 40 percent.
He added that his foundation is looking for $80- to $100-million in grants over the next several years in order to make it feasible for low-income people worldwide to pay for solar-based homes.
And while he remains hopeful, Mr. Heller added: “Venture philanthropists are restless, with an almost endless capacity for frustration.”
May 14, 2009
European Foundation Centre
Glitzy Setting Sparks Criticism at Foundation Meeting
One topic of discussion on the conference’s opening day was the planners’ choice of a gilded, opulent conference site set high above Rome on 15 acres of gardens. The European Foundation Centre says that the Hilton Rome Cavalieri was “chosen because it is one of the only hotels in Rome capable of hosting such a large conference.”
But many participants had misgivings about the issue, or had discussed it with fellow attendees. The choice of venue was somewhat ostentatious given the conference theme of ending poverty, said Haki H. Abazi, a program officer at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Mr. Abazi is also a board member of the Trust for Civil Society in Central & Eastern Europe, in Sofia, Bulgaria, and said that when that organization searched for its next conference site, it chose an old factory in Bratislava, the Slovak Republic.
Meanwhile, Marilyn D. Clancy, senior consultant to the Headwaters Group, a philanthropic-services company in St. Paul, said she felt the hotel and the lunch with wine and all the perks served to participants were apropos. “Italy is about eating and drinking well, and to Italians, this isn’t decadent,” she said, referring to the conference hosts, the Fondazione Rome.
Ms. Clancy added: “Most people here today aren’t suffering, but they are working for those who do. This could be taking place in a tent in the desert, but the mindset would still be, how can we lift others up and give the poor more?”
— Marty Michaels
European Foundation Centre
European Foundations Focus on Ways to Fight Global Poverty
Grant makers and philanthropists worldwide have a great deal to learn from each other, particularly from those in poor countries, said speakers at the annual conference of the European Foundation Centre here.
The theme of the conference, which has drawn some 700 participants from dozens of countries, is “Fighting Poverty: Creating Opportunities.”
The opening plenary, set in a state-of the-art hall in Rome’s Parco della Musica, featured a videotape of José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who gave good wishes to the conference.
But the session’s most fiery talk by far was by Sibongile Mkhabela, who has served as chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, in South Africa, for the past 10 years.
“The world continues to be in a terrible state despite our efforts—are we making any progress?” she asked.
Ms. Mkhabela expressed “a heightened state of anger at the situation.” “We are sometimes like madpeople,” she said, “using the same development and antipoverty methods again and again.”
While Ms. Mkhabela said that she and other activists are tired of “the old, tired entrenched traditions [of development aid]”, indigenous groups—including community foundations, mutual-aid associations, and the like—in South Africa and other democratic countries can provide both inspiration and critical guidance on what poor communities actually need.
Ms. Mkhabela said that nonprofit groups in poor countries need control over their own destinies, and that grant makers everywhere should heed the warning. She said that groups would resist being “moved from HIV/AIDS, to malaria, to women’s issues” at foundations’ whims.
“I want to create a new generation of leaders,” said Ms. Mkhabela. “While it’s extremely important, I don’t want to just feed a few children.”
— Marty Michaels
Copyright © 2009 The Chronicle of Philanthropy