The Deviszont Community Space (DCS) is a hub in the outskirts of Budapest that organises critical pedagogical programmes for working class and Roma people in vocational education. They want to create communities of learning where they bring together young adults to discuss social issues so that they can become politicised and join the long-term fight for social transformation of the Hungarian society. The core members of DCS are social workers, community organisers and educators, and they started Deviszont based on their personal experience and dreams: growing up in the working-class outskirts of Budapest, they all experienced educational inequality first hand, and wished they had such a centre as a resource they could go to outside of public, normative schooling.
Besides the geographical context, which already accentuates central/periphery asymmetries, there is the political climate in Hungary. Years of authoritarian government ruling have belittled ethnic groups’, women’ and working-class communities’ needs, making the work of supporting kids and young adults who would otherwise be disengaged from public life vital. This is why this educational space organises weekly sessions and workshops using the approach of critical pedagogy: a 3-level pedagogical methodology centred on the pillars of community-building, critical thinking and political action. Active since 2018, they have reached hundreds of young people through their training programmes, school activities and community events, which bring together current students and Alumni members who stay involved as part of the wider community and who take up responsibility and organisational work.
The Guerrilla Redistribution
The Deviszont Community Space has been a long-term Guerrilla grantee. We have been funding them for the past 5 years because of their steadfast work of enabling pluralist and progressive education in a context where that’s not accessible, and because we know that these are the people who fill in the gaps where public policy and services fail. Despite their relentless work towards financial sustainability over the years, they know that fundraising is needed if they want to scale their project and reach new pupils and youths with their work.
We see that scalability not only desirable but necessary. The years under the Órban government have created harsh resource scarcity among leftist civil society organisations, so the little money there is left pits organisations against each other. International funding sources like USAID or other are not reliable or no longer available, putting small groups at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the large-budgeted NGOs with big projects and campaigns. Next to this situation, the crackdown on civil society organisations is alarming. In 2025, the government issued a decree restricting NGOs receiving foreign funding, which has heavily impacted the social fabric that is fronting the state and promoting leftist values.
Therefore, our repeated funding in these past few years went into securing some stability for this group, as well as offering some steady ground to continue expanding their scope of work. With our funding they recruited more participants to attend their programmes, and expanded their political education playbook by experimenting with different methodologies. There are also fixed costs that come with running a space that benevolent action can’t reach, which our funding covered too. This year, our 10 year anniversary grants allowed DCS to celebrate their own birthday the way they always dreamed:
“We have been planning to invite a mid-range band for a long time, but so far we have always asked them to perform as a favor. As a result, the event always ends up being smaller than we would like. Our big dream is to invite a performer who can fill the Gólya (which holds about 300 people) and have all our friends, supporters, and people connected to the organization attend.”
