Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)

Appedixes

The Forum Minority Research Institute 299

Appendix 3

The Forum Minority Research Institute

Andrea Lelovics

The Forum Institute, successor to the Forum Foundation and the Katedra Foundation, transformed itself into a non-profit organisation in December 1996. The thinking behind the establishment of Forum Minority Research Institute was to provide proper institutional basis for social science research dealing with ethnic Hungarian and other minorities of Slovakia.

The Institute has actively engaged in the work of Slovak non-profit sector. As the most important of these activities, Forum Minority Research Institute took part in the civil campaign called OK ’98, within which it organised the parallel counting of the votes in south of Slovakia during the 1998 parliamentary elections.

The most important field of the Institute’s activities, however, is the research and documentation of minority cultures. To pursue this goal, Forum Minority Research Institute called on ethnic Hungarian social science centres to participate in its programs. The Ethnic Hungarian Ethnological Association, the Bibliotheca Flungarica, and the Civitas Foundation joined Forum Minority Research Institute with their programs and library resources.

By 1998, Forum Minority Research Institute had become an organisation with far-reaching connections, high-level organisational skills, respectable professional background; an institute that is capable of ensuring continuous operation.

It had also became clear that the individual professional tasks and activities performed within the non-profit sector had to be organisationally separated within the Institute. Therefore, the Forum Information Centre, dealing primarily with civil training and other services provided for civil sector,