Association for the Development of Social Capital
2005-2025
The association named Association for the Development of Social Capital was founded by a group of friends in 2005. We chose the name because it expresses our aspiration to reveal the potential that lies in volunteering and in civil attempts through projects that we make for people living on the periphery of society. In the past 20 years we have had projects in 24 locations in the north of Hungary and in the northern region of the Hungarian Plain primarily helping Roma people, women and handicapped people. We left most locations because as a result of our efforts, the already existing local NGO’s and those that had formed with our help by then had become successfully consolidated and we wanted to look for new places where the community still needed our support to be able to realize their underlying potential. During all that work we have inevitably had both successes and failures.
Our work has been predominantly financed by the EU and other international support, and we have had a lot of volunteers. Wherever we work, we always cooperate with the local authorities, the local healthcare institutions, social institutions and institutions of education and with both formal and informal civil organizations. Over the years we have spent most of our time doing communal work in Roma settlements.
Tenders offered either by the EU or the Hungarian government come with a lot of underlying challenges for us (short duration, it is not allowed to start an enterprise financed by them, to make the project self-sustainable even after it is over, we have to opt for low quality services available to masses, it is impossible to respond and adjust to actual needs, it is always different types of organizations that get the support, etc. ). It was a tender in 2020 that eventually inspired us to start functioning as a social enterprise and to start developing that way. Unfortunately, the pandemic and the withdrawal of the resources considerably hindered our efforts. Still, in a way, it could propel us further towards our goals taking one step at a time.
In the next 5 years we would like to establish a support program that has the capacity to make great progress focusing on and responding to individual/family/small community goals. Therefore, this time we started working in a comparatively smaller village. Our goal is to set up a community centre and a virtual school in Erdőtelek where we could provide the locals with opportunities to connect socially, to get information about mental and physical health, to be given help with learning, career-building, job offers- all in one place.
In order to accomplish that, we are trying to win tenders, and we are also taking part in a project that facilitates self-sustainability in permaculture farming, collaborating with several other organizations. Over the years we have contributed to building a number of community centres, writing curriculums mainly for social and educational purposes, in many places working out their equal opportunity plan. We have been involved as professional supervisors in plenty of projects, we have created and have been managing many social events, neighbourhood talks, cultural events, health screening examinations. We have trained volunteers, have organized voluntary events for various organizations, etc.
We have reached the best results in individual and group mentoring. In those cases, we have managed to reach our set goals in almost every single case that were mostly related to schoolwork or career-building at work. Most of what we currently do is comprised of similar activities based on mentoring connections collaborating with a lot of volunteers.
For further details, you can find our projects at www.ettf.hu .
Our association has from the very beginning been a public-benefit organization.
