Report commissioned by by Macedonian TACSO Office

Financial sustainability is particularly important for the effectiveness of CSOs and for ensuring their active involvement and contribution to social development. One of the sources of funding is the revenue from lotteries and games of chance. The development of enabling environment for CSOs and specifically the financial sustainability of CSOs has been one of the priorities of the TACSO project since the project start in 2009. Thus, the Macedonian TACSO office and TACSO by Macedonian Center for International Cooperation decided to review the comparative experiences from distribution of lottery proceeds for CSOs.

TACSO project commissioned European Center for Non-for-Profit Law to prepare the comparative analysis “Lottery proceeds for CSO work: Luck has nothing to do with it”. The analysis provides a general overview of the characteristics of public and private lotteries distributed to CSOs and presents concise examples from four EU Member States (Croatia, Ireland, United Kingdom and Netherlands), giving an overview of the legal basis, strategies and programs for defining priorities for funding from lottery incomes, bodies, available amounts of the lottery proceeds for CSOs and areas of support, types of support as well as procedures and criteria for selection of beneficiaries.  It concludes with pros and cons when choosing relevant model for providing financial support to CSOs from lottery proceeds.