AVINA

We thank Peter Cleaves for this information about AVINA, of whichj he is Executive Director: "AVINA stands for "acción, vida y naturaleza," or "ação, vida e natureza." Stephan Schmidheiny has always favored V's, perhaps because it is the universal sign for victory. Stephan is an optimist about the possibility of improving the world's condition.  That is, if everybody does his or her part.  The "v's" thus appear frequently in institutions Stephan has created.
NUEVA is the name of the tubing, forest and agriculture companies he donated to VIVA.  In turn, VIVA stands for Visión y Valores or Visão e Valores.  Consistent with Stephan's whole business career, the NUEVA companies follow commendable corporate social responsibility practices and have won numerous prizes. VIVA is the trust that owns NUEVA, makes sure that it is a leader in corporate social responsibility, and in turn finances AVINA -- as long as AVINA lives up to its mission.  VIVA thus is an unusual philanthropic structure that creates checks and balances for both NUEVA and AVINA.  This was Stephan's innovation, which we believe does not exist elsewhere in the philanthropic world -- and, with the test of time, might serve as a model.

Stephan himself is Swiss German, rather than Hungarian although that was an interesting guess.  Brizio Biondi-Morra, the new AVINA President, is of Italian descent and served many successful years as Rector of INCAE, the
Central American business school.  Coincidentally, he was a member of the Jesuit order before beginning his own business career and then going into academia.  However, AVINA's collaboration with the Jesuits relates to your
comment on the Jesuits' good deeds, particularly in education, and not because of religious affinity with the AVINA founder or current president, who is not a Catholic.  Currently AVINA has nearly 500 funded projects in
Iberoamerica, and only two of them are with the Jesuits.

Like Ashoka -- whose name was reported on separately by Margaret and Christian Leitz -- AVINA places stress on personal leadership, ethics and initiative.  Before we speak about a project, we go through a long process of getting to know the individual.  This approach is similar to an investor who is putting their money in the hands of an entrepreneur to achieve an ambitious purpose.  Our ambitions are for greater opportunities for the less advantaged, democratic and transparent governments, respect for nature, more social responsibility and increased human dignity.  It takes special people to struggle day after day for such goals -- given all the obstacles -- so we work hard to locate them.  Once we do find them, we then speak about how we might help them increase their impact -- often working with other AVINA-supported leaders.

We also stress greater cooperation between civil society organizations (NGOs) and the business community, particularly business people who are distressed about the direction of their society (including poverty, crime,
poor education, and corruption, none of which is good for business).  We are betting that cooperation between enlightened business and social sector leaders can represent a new force for change in Latin America.  This task
is not easy, because of historical mistrust between the two groups -- but we are making progress and results are beginning to show.

So -- Ronald -- thank you for your careful reading of the AVINA annual report -- and making in known to other WAISers.  If any others wish to have copies, we would be pleased to send them one (by e-mailing <julie.nordskog@avina.net>.