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  |  15 марта, 2013   |   Читать на сайте издания

Non-profit Reorganisation

Kommersant Daily

By Irina Nagornikh

 

The FDCS proposes throwing money at NGO’s.

 

The Foundation for the Development of Civil Society (FCSD), led by Konstantin Kostin, former head of the Presidential Department of Internal Policy, has prepared a report – to be published soon - on reform within the system of NGOs. In the report FCSD argues the need to increase government funding to the non-profit sector: the Foundation proposes concentrating this additional funding on a limited number of large, nationwide NGOs and creating a system of intermediaries who would be responsible for distributing the money in seven strategic spheres – including religion. However, representatives from NGOs fear that their work will be compromised by government regulation.

 

 According to the report (some of which has become available to Kommersant) the non-profit sector receives inadequate public funding in Russia. The report claims that it is a logical move by the Kremlin to double or triple support for NGOs from the Presidential Grant Programme in 2013 (2.4 billion roubles). The Federal budget has allocated 8.3 billion roubles for this year. (Increased from 4.2 billions roubles in 2012.) The report cites statistics on Presidential grants which show that in 2007 the number of grantees (brokered by six NGO operators) dropped (from 1224 to 585)-  yet funding expenditure remained the same.

 This trend towards larger NGOs should be consolidated says the report, by creating a pool of non-profit operators under the authority of the President – so called Autonomous Non-Profit Organisations (ANOs). These will provide expert advice in seven strategic areas: social care, socio-cultural activity, human rights, military-patriotic, ecology and environment, children’s rights, health care and religion (the four main faiths). These intermediaries should interact with the rest of the grantees as a sort of umbrella structure. According to Mr Kostin it will be necessary to clearly define who the recipients will be - socially orientated NGOs - through legislation –  and what sort of work they will be carrying out. (On 10th March, the State Duma amended the criteria for being termed a socially orientated NGO as one that carried out ‘patriotic education.’ Kommersant.) It will also be necessary to tighten up the system for monitoring and reporting spending of the grants. To this end he proposes setting up a single internet-portal whose function will include ‘naming and shaming those who have misspent the funding.’

 

The report claims that one of the factors hindering the development of the non-profit sector is the lack of transparency on how the grants are allocated combined with poor feedback to the public on how the grants are being spent. It publishes the income of the six Presidential NGO operators. (The Institute for Public Projects for example received 460 million roubles in the period between 2007 and 2012.)

 

Kostin also suggests considering tax deductions for businessmen who donate to socially orientated NGOs, and tax relief for the NGOs themselves. In his opinion, if approved, these changes could become effective in 2015. Mr Kostin is not worried that by supporting the large, national NGOs the smaller, but still worthy ones, will fall by the wayside: he says, many of them were not receiving funding in the first place.

 

This report was not created overnight. The authorities took the task of regulating the activities of NGOs very seriously. Let us remember that amendments to the law have been made whereby NGOs involved in political activities are required to reveal any foreign investment and will then be termed ‘foreign agents’. Later, amendments were also made to the ‘antimagnitskii’ law prohibiting Russians with American citizenship to found NGOs. Yesterday, a source revealed to Kommersant that this has led to the Moscow Helsinki Group (led by Lyudmilla Alexeeva who has U.S. citizenship) and the ‘Human Rights’ movement to create a human rights movement set up to put a stop to these sorts of restrictions.

 

In March, the General Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Tax Service began a large-scale inspection on sources of investment to NGOs – particularly the ‘state affiliation’ of their donors. As reported by ‘Kommersant’ on 30th January, the Ministry of Economic Development predicted losses in the region of 19 billion roubles in 2013 in the NGO sector due to withdrawal of foreign funding. This data was presented at a closed-door meeting with the Russian President by members of the Human Rights Council and the Development of Civil Society. The Ministries have worked out measures designed to ‘increase support for socially orientated NGOs in the period up to 2018’ and to alleviate the fiscal burden for NGOs.

 

‘NGOs can take upon themselves certain governmental functions in areas where it feels unable to cope and in some cases are already doing so’ says the President of the Centre for Democracy and Human Rights, Yurii Dzhibladze. ‘But for the avoidance of doubt, intermediaries appointed by the President to distribute funds should not become substitutes for NGOs as this could lead to the nationalisation of the non-profit sector. Civil Society NGOs should be supported and not steered.’ Daria Miloslavskaya, member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation and Chairman of the Council of Lawyers for Civil Society’ believes that the State has two aims: while it is prepared to do everything in its power to help socially orientated NGOs it is clear on the point that it does not like NGOs becoming involved in politics. She is sceptical of the whole intermediary set up, saying ‘the NGOs tend not to trust the operators because their perspective is miles away from the real-life situation of the non-profit sector and they only pop their heads up when it is time to hand out money.’