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The focus of this year is the future of the endowment model: sector’s aspirations, trends and conditions for endowment development. More than 30 experts participated in the forum and more than 430 people were registered on the forum website. The festival EndowFest, where organizations presented their stories of endowments’ establishing and developing and participants presented their cases in the PechaKucha format, took place for the first time.
The discussion panel “Endowment. More than Money” with the participation of Oksana Oracheva, the General Director of the Vladimir Potnin Foundation; Anton Belov, the Director of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; Svetlana Makoverskaya, the Director of “The Center for Civic Analysis and Independent Research, GRANI”, Co-chair of the Presidium, the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights; and Elena Topoleva-Soldunova, a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, Chair of the Committee for the Non-Commercial Sector Development and Support of Socially-Oriented NGO, Director of the autonomous non-commercial organization “Social Information Agency”, was organized on the final day of the Forum. Veronika Misyutina, the Advisor of the Wealth Transformation Center, Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, facilitated the discussion.
Anton Belov maintained: “Despite difficulties, pandemic and political risks, last year positively influenced the perception of endowments. The difficult situation often stimulates to implement practical initiatives. In a sense, an endowment is the only instrument that gives confidence in the future and ensures “life after life”. We witness the situation that gives an impulse in understanding of endowments. I hope that we will discuss not millions but billions of rubles in endowments of Russian organizations”.
Svetlana Makovetskaya presented a broad view on humanitarian significance of endowments. She said: “An endowment is becoming more and more important in the future. Understanding of endowments along with legal and digital awareness becomes an element of new social literacy. An endowment plays a special role in transforming a humanitarian role of a person in Russia: the new generation defines the environment in a different way, it is mindful about what is important for society. Change of generations develops a new vision of the future and the endowment is a cultural expression of a modern and progressive human being”.
Elena Topoleva-Soldunova talked about the importance of endowments’ promotion. She said: “The cherished idea of endowments is sustainability. But at the same time this is a problem. At present, many Russian NGOs are able to plan only for 2 or 3 years. They lack competences of strategic management yet. This mechanism is not clear and available for every organization and that is why this Forum organized by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation and Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO is so important. It explains in an accessible way what an endowment is and why it is important to those who do not understand how to use it. Such valuable information is necessary so that every non-commercial organization understands how to establish and use endowments”.
Oksana Oracheva states: “If some years ago there was a focus on universities endowments, now we see that an endowment is not an exotic theme for other spheres. I think that in 5 years we will not speak about the endowment separately, we will discuss it within a strategy of a particular organization or sphere. We have moved to a new stage of this instrument development when it is important to speak not only about sums of money but about the results of finances development. The change of the discourse is noticeable: social impact and socio-cultural effect of endowments were thoroughly discussed in the forum. Fortunately, skepticism towards endowments in Russia is decreasing as it is demonstrated by the increasing numbers of the forum participants from different Russian cities”.
Recordings of the discussions is available here