2016

Here you can get a monthly overview of what we organized and how we spent the year 2016.

January

Volunteers’ Meeting and an informal evening in a brasserie – at the beginning of the year

We started the year with the Supporters’ and Volunteers’ Meeting, at which we recognised our Volunteer of the Year. We are extremely grateful to all our volunteers, and are thrilled that their numbers are growing, and they contribute more and more to various tasks of our Foundation. We now have 20 volunteers who offer their work regularly, and several others who help with our main projects. This annual event will take place again in January 2017, and we will invite both our main supporters and our volunteers to celebrate the Opening of the Year. It will include a literary performance as well, where poems by the most famous poet from Ferencváros, Attila József, will be set to music.

Februar

Director of the Ferencváros Community Foundation

It was an important step in our institutional development that the advisory board appointed Erika Barna to be the director of the Foundation. She was a member of the advisory board in the years before and was responsible for the communications of the organisation as a volunteer. For the past 8 years Erika worked as director of communications in a non-profit organisation based in Ferencváros, helping people with addiction problems. Previously she was an editor at Hungarian Radio. She defines herself as a ’bridge-builder’, someone who is motivated to make contacts between communities and worlds that seem very far from each other. One of her most important tasks is to create relationships between the non-profit world and the business world, and she is using what she learnt a few years ago during the Meridian leadership training of the international Common Purpose Hungary. She started running 4 years ago and she loves it passionately. She is a founding member of the Almodovar Female Running Sports Club. She completed her first half-marathon in 2014, collecting financial support for the Foundation. This photo was made for the Forbes Hungary which published an interview with her in November 2016.

 

March

Our Foundation can now be supported online!

We continued our work with developing our office. We employed a part-time clerk and we updated the info-communicative tools in our office creating two working places and making possible online support via the webpage of adhat.hu  through which we can receive both regular and one-off financial support by bank transfer – here.

April

We started a Auction Campaign on Facebook for the Inner-Ferencváros Circle of our Foundation  

We held an online auction with an amazing selection of unique items donated by nine well known individuals and institutions from Inner-Ferencváros – including the National Museum of Applied Art, a local school headmaster, a local theatre, a bar and restaurant, a bookshop owner, a design shop, and a butcher. We succeeded in raising 343,000 HUF towards the Foundation’s 1 million HUF target, which will be distributed among local, non-profit and community projects in the upcoming year.

May

We collected 1 million HUF and broadcast our online radio-show, Radio Raday!

The Foundation organised an Inner-Ferencváros Public Day for the first time, on 7th May. This was also the closing event of Inner-Ferencváros Circle’s Grant Collecting Campaign. During the day we involved many local partners in a variety of activities – as well as an auction, there were specially organised local walks (participants could visit the ‘backstage’ of the Main City Market and the National Museum of Applied Arts, seeing areas which are generally closed to visitors). Altogether we collected 1 million HUF which will be distributed among local projects. More than that, we broadcast our first – 3 hour long – radio-show on the local, non-profit, online radio called Radio Raday! This was a pop-up broadcast in a studio that was as big as two dinner-tables in a cafe’s shopwindow. This spectacular studio was managed entirely by volunteers. The main topics were the civil life and events of the district and the ways we could improve the quality of local community life. A community radio called Radio Tilos helped us by providing technical support.

June

More than 8 millions HUF was raised during the first Hungarian SWIMATHON

70 volunteers swam for their chosen local project in the first Hungarian SWIMATHON. The sponsored sport-event on 18 June, 2016, took place on the Day of Hungarian Swimming. Among the swimmers were school children, local people, a world-famous camera-man, journalists, doctors, businessmen, musicians, care-givers – even some celebrities. Each swimmer could be supported, could be supported financially through the campaign’s webpage www.swimathon.hu, with the money going to their nominated project. More then 8 millions HUF was received from approximately 1,400 donors. The following projects were supported: enlarging an apartment house for families with children living with transplanted bone marrow and in need of rehab, establishing a care-centre for people with addiction, a day-care centre and meeting place for mothers with small kids living in housing complexes, and supplementing the operational costs of the Foundation. The film has English subtitles!

July

Let’s go to Pécs!

Our advisory board consists of 9 members and all of us travelled to visit the Community Foundation of Pécs which was officially established this year. This is the 2nd community foundation in Hungary. We also organised our traditional yearly strategic-planning days in the beautiful Mediterranean atmosphere of Pécs.

 

August

Hurray, it’s holiday!

 

September

Radio Raday again – now from the Main City Market!

Radio Raday’s newest show was broadcast on 15 September, Saturday morning between 9am and 1pm, from the bustling Main City Market. Radio Tilos helped us by providing the technical background, for which we are very grateful. During the show, we invited local people from Inner-Ferencváros and we talked with them about the district, about developing certain areas of community life and their dreams about the kind of district they would like to live in. There were teachers, professors, foreigners living in the district, officials of the municipality, people from various art-shops and creative workshops, leader of a local art gallery, cultural programme coordinator, innkeeper and baker among our guests.

October

Introductory film and report about the Public Area Fund and the projects that were supported by it.

The Ferencváros Public Area Fund supported the following projects in 2015: Ship of Mothers – mothers living in housing estates who organised a Community Garden; Smart Sculptures – houses and walking areas with QP-codes telling stories about the secret life of the district; a Monastery opening its gates to visitors; Firewall coloured by drawings of local kids. All of these great and exciting ideas arrived when the Ferencváros Public Area Fund invited entries for a competition called „This region is not a map”. Our film and report will show the way the projects were realised and summarize the experiences of working together as donor and supported organizations.

 

November

We collected 2.5 million HUF during 2 and half hours in the 2nd Live Giving evening!

Approximately 2.5 million HUF were offered to support three local civil projects in the 2nd Live Giving evening organised by the Ferencváros Community Foundation. The event took place in the Budapest Music Centre’s Library on 22nd November. 93 participants (private donors and representatives of local enterprises and companies) made their offerings on the spot following the presentations of the three projects. We adopted this event format in 2015 after experiencing it in London, organised by The Funding Network Giving Circle. The film is with English subtitles!

December

We celebrated the closing of the Foundation’s first 5 years and the first period of the advisory board’s leadership

Our Foundation celebrated its 5th birthday during December. During these 5 years Gabriella Benedek was the leader of the advisory board. From now on Péter Jordán will follow her in this position. Gabriella put enormous efforts into building a good community within our advisory board making sure that they can work together happily, given that previously the nine board members had not known each other. She helped to shape this pioneer initiative into a stable grant-collecting, fund-giving and community building organisation, which is growing steadily year by year. In December Gabriella decided to step back and give the opportunity to another member of the advisory board to be its leader. We are very thankful for her work and we are happy that she stays with us as a member of the board. Péter, as an architect working in the Ferencváros district for 20 years, knows well the process of city rehabilitation and is deeply committed to our Patron programme which provides long term support from local enterprises and companies to the operations of the Foundation.