Our mission

The Hungarian Environmental Partnership Foundation aims at enhancing the development of an environmentally aware, participatory democratic society and institutional system by strengthening and supporting the civil environmental movements.

The foundation promotes the development of the environmental movement trough providing grants, training, fellowships and technical assistance where necessary.

Conference on the Court Practices of NGO registration: co-organized with the NOSZA program, the High Court and the Pázmány University Law Department on June 8, 2006 this event convened over 80 law practitioners, mainly judges and attorneys, and became the successful culmination of the “test-registration” project.

Roundtable road shows 2004 and 2006: soon after launching the Civil-Partner Trust program and towards its end, we organized with the help of the county civil service centers two series of local NGO roundtable conferences:

Autumn 2004: 19 events in all county capitals (except one) to present the program itself and the outlines of the Civil Vision concept. During these half-day events we also aimed at collecting comments and critiques to the concept not only from NGOs but also from the civil servants (treasury, tax authority), attorneys and judges invited. All together, more than 350 organizations were represented and hundreds of comments came, with the following problems mentioned most often:

Autumn 2006: the closing road show had only 8 stops in the regional centers and concentrated on - besides summarizing our achievements of the past years - on presenting and discussing the concept of the Local Interest – Local Values guide book. Again, it was organized together with the local county civil service centers and drew altogether over 200 participants, NGO representatives and municipal civil servants alike. All these events were also accompanied by intensive local media coverage.

Civil Lobby Roundtables: this informal group of major umbrella NGOs met more or less regularly (all in all 8 times) over the past three years to discuss current legislative developments and drafts. It also often issued joint statements and positions such as in the case of the “greatest creditor of the state” contest in late 2005, drawing attention to the problems related to the delayed payments of contracted state and EU grants.

Press conferences: all in all, during the past years we have organized 9 press conferences related to the diversity of the above projects and events and issued many more press releases. The most recent and successful such events were the award ceremonies of the Real Civil Partnership Award in early 2006 and 2007 as well as the Grantee of the Year Award in autumn 2006 connected to the celebration of HEPF’s 15th birthday. Conscious efforts to use the media to further own aim resulted in a continuously increasing number of coverage over the years (in spite of the disadvantageous media environment – see above):

Media Coverage (HEPF, including the Civil-Partner Trust Program) (1 June 2003 – 28 March 2007)