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The program of the second day includes: a dialogue with an expert in the format of “Morning Coffee”, a story of endowment’s establishment and development from representatives of the Charitable Foundation “Big Break” and the Russian Institute of Theater Arts within the EndowFest and a conceptual PechaKucha discussion with representatives of 4 organizations.
Tatiana Ivshina, the Executive Director of the Foundation “Ulyanovsk – Cultural Capital” and the Head of Endowment “Cultural Capital 73”, opened the program of the second day. She talked about prerequisites for endowment’s establishment and shared the story of the Foundation development. She said: “During the pandemic period people working in the culture sector were confused. Those who managed to go online overcame this difficult situation. Theaters offered recordings of their performances, museums developed online excursions and each organization transformed in the way it could. The best way to benefit from this situation is to use technologies developed in 2020 in the future. However, projects’ digitalization requires significant financial resources. Establishment of the endowment helps to solve these tasks. Thanks to the Vladimir Potanin Foundation we started learning how to establish the endowment in 2019 and continued learning this in 2020. We developed the Charter of our organization, we were thinking about its activities and decided to set up a special NGO. We are the institute in the culture and creative industries. The goal of our endowment is to support the culture sector in the region”.
The festival ЕndowFest with Irina Ryazanova, the Executive Director of the Charitable Foundation “Big Break” and Grigory Zaslavskiy, the Rector of the Russian Institute of Theater Arts and art critic, continued the program.
The Charitable Foundation “Big Break” chose an unusual format: a playback theater. This improvisation form implies that actors, the Foundation staff, transformed the speech of the narrator, Irina Ryazanova, into emotions. Irina Ryazanova said: “Our Foundation is 18 years old and all this time we are helping foster children from children’s homes to become independent persons. Over this period, 701 children have received our support. We established the endowment eight years ago. Before that, we had to change offices and that was very difficult taking into account our specific activities. The light at the end of the tunnel appeared when we decided to establish an endowment. Having participated in the Endowment Forum organized by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation, we understood what we should do. Initially our endowment was established to purchase an office. We solved this problem. Now we are aiming at scaling our activities: we want to increase the number of places for students and the number of teaching staff. And we have understood that we are ready to share our knowledge!”
The Russian Institute of Theater Arts decided to demonstrate a video about an endowment in the educational institution. Grigory Zaslavskiy commented the video: “The Russian Institute of Theater Arts is one of the largest theater art universities which is 143 years old. We got used to be the leaders in theater art education and we became the first theater institution that established the endowment. It ensures scholarships for students and it can help in publishing activities and other projects. We often lack money to pay copyright for plays or implement creative projects or organize internships for students. Each project requires money. Our managing company, VTB bank, is very responsible in terms of funds management. The endowment is the only way to think strategically, all other programs are short-termed”.
The next part of the Forum’s second day program was in the PechaKucha format. Larisa Kozhanova, the Program Director of the Charitable Foundation for helping children with incurable disease after Anya Chizhova opened a series of presentations. She shared practical advice for establishing an endowment in organizations that have just started this activity. She said “We established the endowment half a year ago. When we had started conversations about this, it was like landing Mars. But we submitted an application for the competition “New Dimension” of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation and won. We immediately created a database of managing companies in Russia, but there were not many. The first advice for those who starts setting up an endowment: establish a working group for choosing a managing company. Secondly, negotiate in the same conditions. If you agreed to communicate with one company through a video conference, communicate with others in the same format. Thirdly, discuss assessment criteria for a managing company that are important for your organization. And finally, take some time. We recommend that a system NGO should start thinking about establishing an endowment but it should approach this problem thoroughly and deliberately”.
The next speaker, Anna Shilova, a member of the Governing Board of the non-commercial organization “Personality Integrated Rehabilitation Program “Dream Ski” told us about endowment establishment. She said: “We established our endowment two months ago because we started thinking about our future. “Future” will come for people whom we help, people with disabilities. We were seven years old when we decided to establish an endowment. And this door opened accidently: the crisis helped. It turned out that an endowment is the best vaccine for NGO. We had only to submit an application for the Vladimir Potanin Foundation competition “New Dimension”. It took us 7 months to establish the endowment and we thought that it would take several years. We managed to establish it within a short period of time. Now our donors know: even if they cannot give a donation on time, their money continues work. There are 220 thousand NGOs in Russia and each depends on donations. An endowment is an opportunity to ensure financial stability”.
Tatiana Davydova, an Academic Secretary of the Chyvash National Museum of the Chuvash Ministry for Culture, talked about first steps, hopes and difficulties in establishing an endowment. She said: “Fortunately, Chuvash National Museum also became interested in endowments. At the beginning of the year 2019, we submitted an application for the Vladimir Potanin Competition “Museum Bridges”. Our colleagues’ experience, for example, practices of Vrubel Museum in Omsk, helped us. Obviously, we could not just copy practices, we pursued our own path. A museum’s 100th anniversary became an excellent excuse to establish the endowment. Usually, public funding does not enable us to implement programs that are interesting for general public. But the endowment provides us with an opportunity to organize major exhibitions, bring projects from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. And we are going to spend the endowment income on purchasing the exhibits”.
Olga Egel, the Deputy Head for Social Development, Saint Petersburg Association of Parents with Disabled Children’s public organizations “GAOORDI” finished the series of presentations. She said: “Any NGO is set up to solve socially important problems. Each day we have to decide whether we run a sprint or a marathon. It is possible to solve many small tasks or set ambitious goals. We have been running the marathon for almost 30 years. More than 6.5 thousand people use services of our association and we are responsible for life of other people. This project is life-long and it should be sustainable. Establishing an endowment is a solution for us. Our way was not simple, but we participated in training programs and registered our endowment during our training”.
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