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.

Grassroots movements and regional cooperation in Central Europe after 2000

At the end of October Environmental Partnership for Sustainable Development (EPSD - a consortium of six foundation supporting environmental organizations) and Central European University organized an open forum about grassroots movements in Europe. The Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian and Slovak foundations presented their activities, the characteristic environmental problems of their country and discussed the situation of local movements.

Several concrete problems were mentioned like the case of the Verespatak goldmine, illegal forest exploitation in Romania, and the waste situation in Bulgaria, too. Access to European funds is also a common problem in the region. It could help the NGO sectors a lot in every country, but it turned out that only institutionalized, financially stable organizations could utilize these sources. In Poland for example only 9 percent of the NGOs were able to submit proposals to these funds from which 3 percent could really win some support.

Besides the representatives of Hungarian NGOs and institutions, students and teachers of CEU have been invited, too. Students coming from different countries of the world raised interesting questions and aspects in the discussion. In this way the forum highlighted the importance of grass root movements and the cooperation of citizens anywhere in the world.