Over the 9-10th of November 2014, an administrative meeting took place after VDNKh-8 in the ‘New Peterhof’ hotel and was marked by the participation of all the research fellows from the regional centres.
The meeting’s agenda was packed with items and events; the directors of the centres took part in negotiations with the Petersburg office and members of the International Council, as well as with a representative of the donor organization; the participants heard reports from the regional centres and shared their suggestions on the reports; Elena Belokurova consulted the centres’ staff on grant applications.
Special attention was given to fundraising. Two workshops were held during the meeting. Firstly, ‘The mechanisms of organizing public fundraising for endowment: challenges and success stories in Tomsk’ was conducted by Maria Busygina from the Tomsk State University. The second workshop was called ‘Strategies of financial sustainability for research and expert centres in the Russian regions: varieties of access to sources, challenges and examples of successful solutions’ and was conducted by Svetlana Makovetskaya, a director of Grani from Perm.