Partnership of the State and Charitable Foundations as a Strategy for Increasing Resources of Nonprofit Organizations

While public funding of nongovernmental organizations is a highly sought-after form of NGO support, its amount still does not meet the demand. International experience provides examples of solutions to this problem. Instead of transferring the grantmaking function to designated operators, the state encourages grantmaking foundations to leverage their assets, both financial and institutional, within the framework of philanthropic-government partnerships. This paper aims to explore and synthesize international best practices of joining resources of the state and charitable foundations, which results in a tangible increase in NGO financial support and its effectiveness. The paper focuses on partnership models, such as engaging foundations in grant-making and leveraging resources with government; government match-funding programs to incentivize private donations to charitable foundations; developing various types of institutional partnerships between the state and foundations. Civil society monitoring conducted in 2015 and 2016 by the HSE Center for Studies of Civil Society and the Nonprofi t Sector helped expose challenges and barriers that make philanthropic-government partnerships difficult to initiate and manage. Analysis of the international experience of coping with these challenges has helped to propose measures to overcome such barriers in the Russian context. Examples include the use of innovative tools, such as leveraging resources of the state and foundations for grantmaking purposes within the framework of philanthropicgovernment partnerships; introducing a ratio of government match funding to attract private donations in the priority areas of education, research and culture; developing various institutional arrangements to ensure eff ective collaboration between foundations and government agencies (joint councils, task forces, discussion platforms, etc.)