Growing distress for NGOs in Greece

Since its launch in March 2022, the Victoria Community Center has served as a vital hub in central Athens, supporting individuals seeking integration into Greek society and seeking diverse forms of assistance.

Seraina Loeffel | 15. July 2024

Established in partnership with One Happy Family and other collaborators, the center has consistently provided a secure haven for individuals facing significant challenges, including bureaucratic hurdles, high unemployment rates, and limited access to essentials like food, housing, and jobs. As they are establishing a new life or awaiting opportunities to move to another country, visitors to the Victoria Community Center (VCC) have access to comprehensive services all under one roof. 

Read the article “Let`s talk about Athens” here

A Drop in the Ocean manages the Non-Formal Education and Integration Support Services at the Victoria Community Center. Believing that education is a powerful tool for transformation and social justice, our education programmes aim to emphasize comprehensive language acquisition and digital literacy. Thus, our goal is to provide adult learners with classes in Greek, English, and computer skills, as well as integration support, including job interview preparation, CV and cover letter writing, and other related activities.

Understanding the importance of equipping displaced populations for successful integration into the cultural, social, and economic life of their host communities, our Integration Support Programme is deeply rooted in the principles of inclusion and empowerment.

The ripple effect of NGO and CSO closures in Greece

This year, the Victoria Community Center underwent significant changes as One Happy Family had to cease all operations by the end of February 2024. As the Center was initially opened in collaboration with One Happy Family, we had to bid farewell to a valued partner, who also operated the community spaces and provided security at the center.

Faced with uncertainty about the future of the Community Center, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which provided mental health and psychosocial support to visitors, decided to close its programme and move out of the Center along with One Happy Family. In June, Lighthouse Relief, had had to scale down its social services programme due to financial constraints. This reduction in vital social and integration support for some of the most vulnerable individuals leaves a significant gap in humanitarian protection for those seeking refuge. Forced to downsize our own operations in the midst of this upheaval, A Drop in the Ocean currently offers English and computer classes, CV writing and ad hoc activities.

These far-reaching changes within the center make one wonder about the general well-being of non governmental organisations (NGOs) and other civil society organisations (CSO) in Greece that provide services to refugees, and one will soon find that the phenomenon of CSOs struggling to keep their operations going, and thus continue to provide their services, extends far beyond the four walls of the Victoria Community Center. In order to get to the bottom of how and why we see civil society organisations across Greece having to either reduce or cease their activities, in this article we aim to explore the main reasons and relate them to the changes taking place in the Victoria Community Center.

Drawing on many years of experience navigating the sector ourselves, we will also draw on a survey and interviews conducted by the organisation Choose Love, the results of which were published in a comprehensive report in February 2021. These results are not, as one might think, outdated, but rather more accurate than ever, as today we are witnessing the manifestation of what were, at the time of publication, mere fears.[1]

Navigating new legal hurdles 

Key to understanding what’s happening now for organisastions working with displaced populations across Greece is first and foremost understanding the implications of a new law passed by the current government in 2020. Migration was a key issue in the election campaign of the ruling New Democracy party, which stated that there should be a strict demarcation of the role of organisations in managing migration, and that only organisations that have registered with the Greek authorities should be able to work – and only if the Greek authorities deem them useful.

In order to create, as the Minister of Migration and Asylum emphasized, order, it was first announced in November 2019 that all NGOs and other CSOs would have to register their organisation on an existing online platform, followed only three months later by Law 4662/2020, which made registration a mandatory condition to operate in Greece. After seven months of several changes in the legislation and requirements for registration, a new Joint Ministerial Decision 10616/2020 was published, which again significantly changed the conditions and requirements from previous laws and ministerial decisions.

It now required organisations that had applied for registration in the new registry under Law 4662/2020 to submit additional documents within 40 days. For many NGOs operating throughout Greece, which are small in number and capacity, obtaining these required documents proved to be a major challenge.

Over the past few years, many NGOs have faced a general increase in the cost of running their programmes. While some of these costs are not directly related to the new legislation’s registration process, others are. Organisations are required to submit a two-year audit of their finances by a certified public accountant. However, such can only be obtained if the organisation has legal status in Greece, making it a mandatory aspect of registration.

This has been problematic for several organisations, many of which stated that they did not have legal status in Greece at the time of the new legislation, but were registered in another country. It also leads to a paradoxical situation where organisations cannot comply with the obligation to register because the organisation has not had legal status for at least two years, but also cannot operate on the territory of Greece for at least two years because the organisation is not registered. Organisations with Greek legal status, on the other hand, are burdened by the prohibitively high cost of these audits.

Greek legislation goes beyond requiring annual financial statements and annual activity reports for registration; it requires proof of efficiency, financial stability and quality. One particular requirement to prove efficiency and quality is the obligation to get ISO certified. ISO certification consists of a third party attesting that the organisation complies with standards from the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) regarding quality management. However, ISO certification entails substantial annual costs for organisations.

In particular for the small organisations these additional costs pose a significant financial burden. The high costs entailed by the requirements for registration along with the excessive length of registration procedures, the continuous changes in legislation, have created legal uncertainty amongst civil society organisations and have supported the general strong sentiment that there is a deliberate attempt from the Greek authorities to eventually force organisations to cease their operations. Currently 88 organisations are approved on the Ministrys platform, but among these we also find several NGOs no longer active in Greece.  

NGO sustainability amidst financial challenges  

Another important factor that affects both quality and budget is the heavy restrictions that humanitarian donors generally place on overhead funding. Journalist Zach Theiler, in his article for The New Humanitarian, discussed how overhead funding rules would starve grassroot NGOs because most donors want to see their aid money spent on projects and aid, not on salaries for the people running the project. But without enough overhead funding, small NGOs struggle to hire or retain staff or pay the bills. Restrictions further hamper organisations’ ability to invest in their staff, and as with any business, the less you invest, the less you get back.

In short, organisations are unable to hire professionals or invest in their staff, which in turn makes them dependent on a stable number of volunteers – often international volunteers. While short-term volunteers are often goodwill ambassadors who bring passion and, at best, experience to their work, they generally lack the reliability and expertise that experienced staff bring. It becomes a balancing act between the benefits of diverse input and the cost savings that short-term volunteers bring against the investment in trained staff and, ultimately, building solutions for long-term development.

For NGOs to achieve this, there is no other way than to break out of the “starvation cycle” in which NGOs continue to rely on the financial and human resources of volunteers, receiving just enough funding to run short-term projects, but not enough to invest in improvement and financial independence.

Geopolitical shifts since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022 have led to inflation across Europe, which peaked in October of that year. As inflation generally describes the imbalance between supply and demand in the goods markets, the main driver of current developments remains the high demand for electricity, gas and fuel, all resources whose costs are severely affected by national and international conflicts.

With people having less money to spend, coupled with a decline in media coverage of events in the Mediterranean and the refugee situation as a whole, NGOs that rely heavily on private donations are confronted with increasing costs and decreasing funding. However, in order to maintain their independence, neutrality, adaptability and flexibility, it is essential that NGOs continue to be able to rely on private funding.

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The additional obstacles, both unrelated and related to the 2020 legislation, and the generally higher costs have been faced by NGOs across Greece, complicating their efforts to continue providing services to displaced populations and maintain their standard of operations. As a result, several NGOs have had to close or reduce their programmes and activities. As such, the closure of previous partners at the Victoria Community Center is not an isolated phenomenon.

With One Happy Family gone and other partners struggling, the future of the center remains unclear to this day. However, we were fortunate to find a new partner in the Saffron Kitchen Project in April 2024, allowing the center to continue to provide food and safe community spaces for visitors, including its café – the heart of the community center.

Despite the Victoria Centers’s uncertain future, its commitment to serving the community, and with it the most vulnerable, has not diminished. A Drop in the Ocean, along with the remaining partners, is more committed than ever to providing the best possible support and keeping the center’s doors open for as long as possible.

References: 

[1] To ensure consistency, the term “NGO” will be used throughout this article. However, it should be noted that Choose Love initially utilized the term “Civil Society Organization” (CSO) in their report. It is acknowledged that these terms are not entirely interchangeable and do not fully encompass the same entity.