PACT Foundation team extended team has has a rich experience in facilitating the development of community based organizations by using complex methods of training, community facilitation, consultancy and small non-repayable grants (seed funding) in the Southern part of Romania. All the other PACT programmes and projects have been created using as model its central community organizations development programme “Learning, Participation, Trust”.
This programme was started by Allavida, a British development agency (www.allavida.org), and was implemented in 4 Central and Eastern European countries, starting with Bulgaria (1997), and continuing with Croatia, Bosnia and finally Romania in the Autumn of 2002. In Romania, the programm started as a partnership between Allavida (Great Britian), Workshop for Civic Initiatives Foundation from Bulgaria, international consultancy (Charles Stewart Mott Foundation), the Romanian Community Development Association and a local implementation team, consisting in a coordinator, a programme assistant and a partner team of trainers and consultants.
Allavida played a central role in conceptualizing the programme – they assured its thorough implementation, and brought together and developed the team, mobilizing resources, promoting the programme and ensuring an experience exchange with similar programmes in other countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Kyrgyzstan). Although Allavida was the main initiator of the programme in Romania, right from the beginning, its plan was to build capacity at a national level in order to transfer the author rights of the programme to a Romanian organization. Thus, starting with the Spring of 2005, during the second round of the programme in Romania, the implementing team started planning the creation of a new organization – PACT Foundation – which could allow the “Learning, Participation, Trust” programme to continue and, together with it, many other initiatives to be developed. Consequently, “Learning, Participation, Trust” became the central programme of the new Foundation, singular in Romania through its complex approach and methodology, as well as the program flow itself.