NIOK

Our Social Entrepreneurship studies led us to the next site visit among many to the organization NIOK, located near what used to be Moskva Ter, but is now Szell Kalman Ter (some noname). We duly arrived to the site and sat down with Zsuzsanna Pikó who works as the Programme Director of NIOK. NIOK is a Nonprofit Information, Training and Service Center, which exists to help NGOs with various administrative duties and similar to NESsT, offers services such as consulting, advisory, training and mentoring. But unlike NESsT, NIOK also caters to NGOs not by offering grants, but by offering services, for a small fee, in which they can have access to the center for workshops or meetings or other administrative services, in addition to the others they provide. NIOK also keeps an up-to-date NGO database and as a civil service center they have day to day contact with clients helping with fundraising, capacity training and use of infrastructure. NIOK serves to offer connective services to the civil center and to act as a portal for the sharing of information, proposals, and tenders and allow government contact to NGOs. They help those who have great ideas to set up NGOs and allows access to volunteers and thus possibilities to start projects. This is similar to the NGO service center we met with in Eger which also offers services including internet access, copying and printing services, in addition.

After giving a brief introduction of what NIOK does, our speaker allowed us to input what it was we wanted to learn from her, and knowing that NIOK has been working hard in the recent weeks with the new legislation concerning re-registration of NGOs, we asked her to discuss more and delve more information about the new law and simply trying to gain more insight.

Over the past few weeks, we have met with so many speakers and organizations and heard many differing views concerning the new law that there are so many opinions it was difficult to really get a grasp of what the law entailed and the details as to how it really affects the NGO sector. The new legislation had been broken down to basically dictate how NGOs are established and how they are operated. Our discussions and questions were geared more towards Public Benefit Organizations, which are technically just a status for a foundation or association. Definitively, it means that an organization is more transparent than other organizations and more active on the field in whatever cause the organization is fighting for.

We learned today that many of the qualms with the new legislation is due to the question of why it is needed in the first place. With a focus on Public Benefit Organizations, Zsuzsa explained that there was never anything wrong with the existing law in the first place; in fact, the existing law was very good. The only problem was the implementation and application of the law that was the problem. The current law defines PBOs as organizations which are fully transparent in everything they do (with few exceptions) and that they do not deal with politics. The problem arises when organizations are not adhering to the rules and not upholding their transparency, for example, filing this annual public benefit report and presenting it in a public forum.

At first look, it seemed that the misconception I had was that this law was an attempt to alleviate that problem and try to keep an up-to-date data base on the NGOs that exist and to really try to administer this transparency better. But lack of attention on the side of policy makers and feelings that the new law and re-registration is completely unnecessary has thus brought a lot of controversy and dissatisfaction with the new government especially. However, like all things in life, Zsuzsa had finished off her presentation conveying that this is not so much a problem, but moreso a challenge that the sector must learn to overcome.