CEE Trust History

The Trust for Civil Society in Central & Eastern Europe ("CEE Trust") was launched in January 2001 as an independent public charity organization with endowment support from a group of private grant-making foundations. Current donors include Atlantic Philanthropies, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ford Foundation, German Marshall Fund of the United States, Open Society Institute, Pfizer Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The major goal of the CEE Trust has been to promote the development of civil societies in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

In the period 2001-2005, the CEE Trust had three mutually reinforcing objectives:

• To support legal, fiscal and political environments in which civil societies can flourish;
• To strengthen the nonprofit sectors in the target countries through institutional capacity building; and
• To support the long-term financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations.