A treasure trove of experiences behind the scenes: struggles, successes and everything in between

2026 brought the long-awaited change to the country. Since then, lots of friends and acquaintances have been asking us: ‘So, has anything changed yet? Are you getting more funding now?’ Unfortunately, the answer is no, but we can’t help but smile a little, as we know it doesn’t happen that quickly, and I fear that civil society organisations will be very much at the bottom of the list when it comes to solving these problems. 

However, some independent funding has finally reached us – funding that the civil society sector has been waiting for for a long time. Despite this, funding for this area remains extremely low; there are a great many of us trying to compete for very little money. And the larger grants are invariably won by those large civil society organisations that are well-known, large in scale, reach a great many people, and whose communication is far more sophisticated and professional than, say, ours. It’s not that we begrudge them the money; we simply want to highlight just how difficult it is for a small organisation to develop, grow and secure a foothold when it comes to such significant funding. Once again this year, not a single one of our applications has been successful, even though we’ve submitted one almost every month. For smaller civil society organisations, available resources are often limited. I consider it a great achievement in itself that, for example, over the past 10 years we have not had a single grant exceeding 10 million, or even 9 million, forints, yet we still operate in an innovative, organised and well-thought-out manner. 

The main lesson we have learnt from most of our setbacks – apart from the fact that there is a severe shortage of resources and competition is therefore fierce – is that we are not reaching enough people. We currently provide personalised mentoring to 34 children. For many donors, this is considered too few these days. There are some donors we’ve been applying to for years, but we cannot demonstrate a large enough number of children. However, we do not wish to set about expanding, because we believe that personalised mentoring can only be truly effective if a mentor works with a maximum of three children. This allows the relationship to deepen and a genuine bond of trust to develop; the mentor is not spread too thin across many children, but can focus on the individual needs of the children assigned to them and support them accordingly. This also allows for a much more effective and personal relationship to develop with the children’s families, enabling us to respond to their actual needs.

At Élmény Tár, our primary aim is always to ensure that there are as many supportive, helping adults as possible around the children. If you take a look at the our annual reportt, which clearly shows just how high our HR costs are. This is because we believe that we can only be professionally strong and make a real impact if our professional team consists of a sufficient number of paid staff who are paid to focus on this work, so they do not have to, or only have to partly, focus their attention elsewhere.  One of the grant applications that has just been rejected would have given us the opportunity to achieve growth that would have enabled us not only to expand the professional team, but also to strengthen back-office functions and bring in new staff.

Before submitting another grant application, we carried out an in-depth, comprehensive organisational SWOT analysis, incorporating the views of our staff. It became clear from this that there was a need to increase salaries and reduce the administrative burden associated with grant applications. It therefore became necessary to develop the management team as well, because if there are more people carrying out fundraising activities, we will have more resources. Of course, this may be obvious in many organisations, but we generally use all our resources to develop the professional team, as I mentioned earlier. In our organisation, Zsófi is solely responsible for fundraising and administration, and she also coordinates communications. This makes it very difficult to move forward and take the organisation to the next level. At present, our diverse system of private and corporate sponsors ensures the day-to-day running of the mentoring programme, but unfortunately this is not sufficient to cover development, professional training, mental health support for children and adults, fairer pay, unforeseen repair and renovation costs, advertising, etc. 

We, however, would like to grow and stand on an increasingly stable footing. We cannot wait any longer for funding opportunities. Unfortunately, most funding schemes only support projects where one has to meet a whole host of indicators – which may not necessarily be all that important and/or relevant – for not a great deal of money. We have therefore decided to further develop our base of private and corporate supporters so that we can operate more securely and predictably, and be able to set money aside and build up reserves.