Characteristics of nonprofit organisations in education and volunteering in the light of statistics (2010-2022)

István Sebestény – Anna Mária Bartal 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.53585/OnkSzem.2024.1.55-81

Abstract

Until the end of the 1990s, education was the second largest focus in the Hungarian nonprofit sectors both in terms of numbers and percentage of the nonprofit sector. At that time, it seemed that there was an opportunity to develop a group of nonprofit organisations within the education sub-sector that would be able to take on service-like tasks to complement, correct, or even replace the public and market sectors in this area. The focus of our study is to analyse the changes in the structural characteristics and volunteer activities of the educational nonprofit organizastons between 2010 and 2022 with a special focus on the crisis-ridden period between 2020 and 2022. Based on the analysis of nonprofit statistical data, our results showed that the education sub-sector has experienced a significant decrease in terms of the number of organisations. Although the share of the nonprofit sector in total revenues has been steadily decreasing, it still ranked in the top fifth of organisations. Between 2010 and 2022, the average of 35,000 volunteers in the education sub-sector contributed an average of 3.3 million hours, with an estimated average value of HUF 4.8 billion. By 2022, education volunteers, who accounted for 9 percent of the domestic volunteer sector, contributed 6 percent of all volunteer hours worked, which was also 6 percent of the estimated total value of volunteer hours. The results suggested that, given its social embeddedness, changes in the education sub-sector were strongly influenced by the structural and governance reorganisation of public education, changes in tax legislation allowing for a 1 percent donation, local government and citizen 'disinterest', and resource constraints. The year 2020 marks an absolute low point for the number of educational nonprofit organisations, from which they have been able to bounce back to a level that exceeds previous levels in terms of the number of organisations, revenue, employees, and volunteers. However, the 2022 statistics show a relative weakening of the sub-sector.

Keywords: education, education policy, education services, education nonprofit organisations, volunteering