MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

Gabriel Baracatt. CEO.

2019 marked Fundación Avina’s 25th anniversary, and as we celebrate our accomplishments of the past two and a half decades, we look ahead to new challenges with gratitude for the experience that we now have under our belt. We are proud of the transformations and results achieved along with our allies (a small sample of which are detailed in this report), but we must not rest on our laurels. Instead, we must renew our commitment to addressing the challenges of tomorrow: the concentration of wealth among a small few, the limited number of opportunities for which billions of people on the planet compete, diminished human rights, corruption that deteriorates democratic institutions, and organized crime, among others.

We are facing two types of social protests that are growing exponentially and that are collectively bringing issues and demands to the forefront, using two strategies: one that has no visible leaders, as Sean mentioned previously, and one that is embodied by people who manage to synthesize the profound questioning that many are thinking and feeling. One example is Greta Thunberg, who embodies the climate challenge agenda and represents thousands of Young people who watch as the present steals their future.

Civil society must come up with a social architecture and innovative strategies so that the momentum of massive demonstrations, whether organized by citizen collectives or emerging global leaders, can spur on the transformational processes implemented by organizations. Mass protests and movements that are having an exponential impact on the planet have to be taken advantage of in order to add value and become part of the processes of change promoted by organized civil society. We need to complement civil organization with spontaneous civil action, because the latter is a pathway – and often a shortcut – to achieving systemic changes that are deeper and swifter tan those achieved solely through planned interventions that seek to influence public policies.

We must do this because our core work is linked to two pivotal issues: the survival of the species on a planet riddled with the effects of development, and the re-engineering that democracies must undergo in order to organize increasingly complex societies. When it comes to the climate change agenda, governments must be more ambitious in their goals to reduce the effects that lead to the deterioration of the planet. To do so, we must increase civil society’s capacity for advocacy and craft strategies that complement the policies implemented by governments and multilateral agencies. The lackluster results of the 25th Conference of the Parties to the Convention (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Madrid are a wake-up call, not only in terms of the need to deepen negotiations, but also in terms of the need to shorten the time limits for reaching agreements.

This is why Fundación Avina and a group of partners collaborated on #6DIt’sNow, a global campaign that reached 93 countries and brought together more tan 14,000 people, 1,114 organizations, 28 private companies, and 3 state actors, along with media outlets, schools, and celebrities. All of these people and groups carried out environmental actions on December 6th, at the same time as the COP25 meetings. These actions included planting thousands of trees in several different countries, with the goal of fostering proactive climate behavior and collectively overcoming the individual frustration caused by a crisis of such great dimensions as those reached by climate change. They also created a global community based on concrete, simple actions that together can reach the scale and resilience required to help combat the crisis and create a sustainable planet.

The other agenda that is being profoundly questioned is the one promoted by an economic model based on industrial and commercial development, one that not only negatively impacts the environment, but also leads to the concentration of wealth and social exclusion. For those who follow the work of Avina, you know that since our earliest days we have supported the idea of changing the way in which businesses are conceived and grown.

This includes what was once known as “inclusive businesses” as well as getting to the heart of the financial industry. The very concept of the function of capital in small, mid-size, and large companies must be reassessed, or it will be extremely difficult to change the current situation. It is for this reason that we have been partnering with several ethical finance initiatives, referred to as such because they place ethical decision making at the center of how they manage money, with an understanding of the social or environmental impact investments have on the real economy rather than a focus on speculative opportunities that produce short-term profits but Benefit neither people nor planet. Avina’s partnership with the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, the formation of a regional Ethical Banking ecosystem, and the ongoing support of triple bottom line funds are all part of this institutional priority.

With a mindset that we must ensure and accelerate the impact of the opportunities we support, we have also invested in an array of disruptive technologies envisioned by brilliant entrepreneurs, in order to bring them to market and turn them into people-oriented solutions on a global scale. You will see in this report a representative sample of our portfolio, with far-reaching innovations that represent a sea change in sectors that are critical for humankind, such as water, clean energy, the cybersecurity of public goods, and healthcare.

I would like to close by congratulating our Board Chairman, Sean McKaughan, on the publication of the book CollaborAction, because it allows us to disseminate and share Avina’s collaborative process model. The executive team is making progress on designing an operating model geared toward solidifying systemic changes.

The best gift that Fundación Avina has received in the past 25 years is the human capital that brings it to life. The members of Avina’s team that lend themselves, mind, body, and soul, to the causes we support; the members of the Board of Directors that endorse and enrich the challenges that we take on to transform the planet; and our allies that, year after year, push against the frontier of possibility in order to expand impact and improve quality of life for millions of people. The best way to celebrate the passing of 25 years is to think about the systemic changes we hope to see in the next 25 years to come.