Poland: the widening gap between poor and rich organizations

What is understood by the third sector, is, in fact, a group of very different organizations, from small, local-based organizations of volunteers to large, complex and profit-making institutions that hire hundreds of professionals. The funding of the recent quantitative studies of the nonprofit sector in Poland (conducted every two years since 2002) has shown the widening gap between poor and rich organizations. The most significant indicator of this phenomenon is the fact that while in 2003, 10% of the richest organizations accumulated 83% of the total third sector?s revenues in Poland, in 2005 this 10% of organizations accumulated almost 90%. What is more, in 2005, 4% of organizations accumulated up to 80% of the total revenues of the Polish nonprofit sector. What is interesting is the fact that 3% of the Polish organizations with the highest budgets are those that receive the E.U. funding, with EQUAL, in particular. Since the absolute amounts of the E.U. structural funding is quite significant and higher than absolute amount a single organization can get from any other source, and since only large and professional organizations are able to receive this funding, this clearly suggests that this is the E.U. funding that is responsible for the growth of budgets of large and already rich organizations. What contributed to this widening gap between poor and rich organizations is also a fact that while one can witness the growth of big grants to conduct large projects for big organizations, there are fewer, supporting grants for smaller organizations. The fact that there is so much E.U. funding available to large organizations made many professionals leave smaller organizations to be hired (and receive much higher salaries) by large organizations. This is proved by the research that showed that the number of people with paying jobs has not changed over last few years, yet the number organizations that hire staff decreased from 33% in 2004 to 26% in 2006. As a consequence, however, smaller organizations lose people who could be most effective in searching funds and in work towards their higher professionalization. This, in turn, might lead even further to the widening of the gap between poor and rich organizations in Poland. Is not then a paradox that the E.U. structural funding (with the EQUAL program, in particular, given its very name) that was aimed at equalizing actually provokes the growth of inequalities?