Fundación Avina was created in 1994 by Swiss entrepreneur Stephan Schmidheiny to promote sustainable development in Latin America. In 2001, it was formally established as a Latin American organization with the mission of driving large-scale change for the region’s sustainable development.

In its early years, Fundación Avina focused on the identification, support, and development of leadership, engaging with social and business leaders to strengthen its initiatives in favor of sustainable development. This phase relied primarily on Avina’s own financial resources.

Recognizing that systemic change requires collective effort, Avina’s second phase focused on connecting leadership across networks and collaborative spaces with regional reach.

Building on these learnings, Avina entered a third stage focused on promoting intersectoral collaborative processes. This approach involved forming alliances around shared agendas for the common good, leveraging both Avina’s resources and contributions from partners committed to systemic transformation.

This collaborative model expanded Avina’s geographic reach. While rooted in Latin America, Fundación Avina adopted an identity as a Global South actor, with a presence and impact extending to African countries. Today, Avina operates with a team of over 120 people across Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Africa.

As Avina marked its 30th anniversary in 2024, it embarked on a new phase centered on collaborative geopolitics. This approach sees geopolitics as a strategy for convergence and collaboration—viewing Latin America as a unified territory, recognizing the interconnectedness of biomes, and understanding resources in terms of the people and territories that steward them.

This vision guides Avina’s commitment to designing strategies and actions that reduce power asymmetries and foster inclusive, transformative change through collaboration and care.

Stephan Schmidheiny founded Fundación Avina in 1994 to promote social and business leadership in sustainability and social inclusion. 

In 2003, after retiring from business and philanthropy, he created VIVA Trust—donating his shares in Grupo Nueva, which included all his productive investments in Latin America. 

The governance and administration of VIVA Trust are legally independent from Schmidheiny, enabling him to step away from direct involvement with Avina and pass on governance to an independent board and Latin American leadership. 

To ensure sustainability, Avina's governance model also focused on reducing financial dependence on the Trust by diversifying its funding sources. Today, VIVA Trust is one of several funders supporting Avina's mission. 

Fundación Avina is proud to be part of the legacy of Stephan Schmidheiny—a leader at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio, a global advocate for corporate social responsibility, and a generous supporter of sustainability efforts across Latin America and beyond.