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.

NESsT

Our site visit for today was at NESsT and met and talked with Peter Varga who is the Senior Manager of the Central and Eastern European division of the organization. NESsT stands for Non-profit Enterprise and Self-sustainability Team which does not support a single cause, but instead helps and supports a variety of organizations with a tantamount cause diversity. They combine venture philanthropy with consulting services and training workshops through their NESsT Venture Fund, Consulting and University services.

This was an interesting organization because unlike the others which we visited, their support of other organizations means that their mission is much different and as such, Peter offered a very different viewpoint in terms of Social Enterprise and the NGO sector. Similarly, we had a guest speaker, Scsaurszki Tamás, who came in to talk to us about 2 weeks back and he was a freelance consultant. It was quite interesting to learn about his work because one of the first thoughts that popped into my mind as we started learning more about the NGO sector was whether or not there were NGO consultants since a lot of the reasons why good ideas go under is because there is so much that these people who have creative ideas don't know about keeping an organization sustainable and moving forward from it just being a hobby.

NESsT and Tamás are similar in that they work with various NGOs in different countries, gaining context and using information to act as a catalyst. With Scsaurszki Tamás, we were introduced to NGO work in the corporate sector and the idea of "Social Economy", which tries to combine social and financial groups. (Think financial institutions in the social community), as well as the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in terms of corporations, often used for reasons which are not altruistic.

Of course, Tamás only worked with smaller organizations and only in Hungary and Poland. NESsT focuses on organizations in emerging market countries including Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia as well as countries in South America including Chile and Brasil. The organization aims for helping the fresh, young civil society with undeveloped local philanthropy and it divides its venture philanthropy into Financial, Intellectual, and Social divisions. Financial includes multi-year financial support by keeping the organization sustainable and straying away from dependence of donors but through other outlets. Intellectual refers to mentoring, advisory and coaching for social enterprise. NESsT contributes to this through many different mediums, such as workshops as mentioned earlier, but also through conferences and forums, such as the Social Enterprise day they hold annually. Finally, Social refers to networking both among organizations and other parties such as pro-bono advisers.

Peter ran through much of the philosophy, mission and portfolio of the organization and focused a lot on how they choose what organizations to help and how they contribute to the development and expansion (if desired) of those organizations. They try to find organizations which are stable in many aspects such as leadership, structure and management, and of course, have a great idea, generating a commercial product which helps contribute to diversify their portfolio.

It was most interesting to hear from him because many of our other speakers and site visits often showcased people who were passionate in a specific cause, whether its helping disabled or disadvantaged children, or helping a discriminated against minority to integrate and have a higher quality of life in the current society, NESsT and Peter were passionate about helping organizations help others.