2020 has been a year for action and commitment

The year we are leaving behind has been unexpected and hard for everyone. The effects of social crises and the climate emergency have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been a challenge for humanity. From the Foundation we take stock of 2020, the year in which we have also commemorated our first ten years of work.

We face 2021 with a different world from the one we had just 12 months ago. From the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation we take stock of this time to extract the lessons learned and start the new year with a strengthened commitment. “The health crisis has made us even more aware of the eco-social crisis we are going through,” says Isabelle Le Galo, our director for Spain.

In this context, we have strengthened our support for the social economy, financing the emergencies caused by the virus but, at the same time, sustaining a social fabric made up of small entities – many of them that we already supported previously – capable of driving systemic transformation.

“Today more than ever, the context invites us to reflect in depth on what our positioning will be in ‘the post-pandemic world’ to continue reaffirming our commitment to support those who have the desire to transform society,” says Le Galo.

Our Emergency and Solidarity Plan in the face of the pandemic crisis

Fully aware of the exceptional nature of the current crisis in which we find ourselves, in 2020 we decided to take unprecedented measures and launched an Emergency and Solidarity Plan in the two areas of action on which we are focused: Citizen Art and Sustainable Food.

This has resulted in extraordinary support for some thirty projects in our two territories of intervention, France and Spain, which have also been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our actions of the Emergency and Solidarity Plan have pursued a double objective: on the one hand, to support our current collaborators and, on the other, to put our Foundation at the service of those who accompany the most vulnerable people. This plan has involved the modification of the allocation of 20% of our funds for subsidies.

Likewise, in Spain we have promoted the generation of a Recovery Fund endowed with 532,000 euros that have been distributed among various initiatives that contribute to the creation of networks and the implementation of new models of action. Among the initiatives we have supported is the promotion of the main agents of change – such as a Resistance Fund for artists – and the promotion of various studies that help us to better imagine the transformation of society in conjunction with the resolution of social emergencies. These are the cases of the “Culture Reactivation Report”, the research “Feeding a sustainable future” by Ana Moragues or the study “Citizen responses to covid-19: resilience, solidarity and social creativity”.

In addition, 2020 has confirmed that the Social and Solidarity Economy makes more sense than ever. In this context, we have also presented this year the report “Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE). A favorable ecosystem for social transformation”. The data provided by this study show that SSE is one of the most hopeful tools for building a more just and equitable world. The SSE also shows that, in addition to creating, it also cares. Something that, after the year we have lived, makes more sense than ever.

Our lines of support for projects in Sustainable Food and Citizen Art

Together with these emergency grants, as every year since our creation as a Foundation in 2010, we have launched two annual calls, one for each of our transversal and necessary lines of action: Sustainable Food and Citizen Art and for the two countries in which we operate.

In Spain, our calls were developed under the slogan “Alliances for a Cultural Democracy”, aimed at collaborative programs for the generalization of transformative mediation practices and “Territorialized Food Systems” for the transition to sustainable food, relocating the processes of these systems through local policies or collective catering initiatives.

As a result of these calls, we selected a total of 38 projects that will be developed over the next two years. “All the projects we accompany are for us the tool to build the future,” says Isabelle Le Galo. “They are ‘levers of change’ with which as a Foundation we want to pave the way towards Sustainable Food and value the usefulness of Art as an engine of Citizenship”. In this sense, the support we provide is not limited to financial financing but is developed in the form of accompaniment, advice and training.

In November 2020 we held – for the first time online – the Kick-Off Seminar for these projects, a key moment for us as it marks the beginning of the path and facilitates the creation of synergies between their promoters. As a result of the seminar we have developed a website with a mapping of projects, which will make it easier for other agents in the ecosystem to delve into them. In this Kick-Off Seminar we also have the participation of projects that by their very nature are not limited to the scope of the calls, but that accompany us on the path that we undertake each year together with the selected initiatives.

In addition to providing direct funding and support to projects through the different calls, we are progressively carrying out demanding work to guide investments in coherence with our strategy of impact and social benefit.

Launch of the Committed Artist Award and the Daniel Carasso Fellowship

Another of our great novelties as the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, despite the difficulties of 2020, has been the launch of the new Committed Artist Award to recognize the work of creators who use art to respond to different social problems both in France and in Spain. In its first edition, our prize has been awarded by an international jury to three Spaniards and two French: Neïl Beloufa, visual artist and filmmaker; Patrick Bouchain, architect, master builder and set designer; Cristina Pato, bagpiper, pianist and educator; Santiago Cirugeda, social architect and Julio Jara, visual artist.

In the field of Sustainable Food, our other line of work, we have also created a new recognition: the Daniel Carasso Fellowship, a reformulation of the homonymous award that already existed previously. With it, our objective is to promote the research fabric in Spanish universities, while supporting young people who dedicate themselves to postdoctoral research with a systemic vision of sustainability in food, from its different perspectives.

We celebrate a decade of social

commitmentAlso last year, on the occasion of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of our birth as the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation in France, our 2019 Activity Report has been published, which includes not only the work we carried out that year, but also the compilation of a whole decade of actions to build a fairer world by supporting transformation through Sustainable Food and Citizen Art.

In those 10 years, we have allocated more than 80 million euros to support and encourage more than a thousand projects in France and around the world, as well as in Spain since 2014.

2019 Annual Report Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation – Bringing our mission to life

Progress in governance and coalitions in the face of the climate emergency

The commemoration of a decade of work has also included advances and developments at the level of governance. In this sense, in the face of the underrepresentation of young people in decision-making that affects society as a whole, we incorporated Bochra Benachour and Diego García-Vega into our Executive Committee last October, young people under 28 years of age with an interesting career, their eyes set on the planet and society and with a great desire to change things.

These appointments are the result of one of the commitments we make as a Foundation: to offer younger generations the possibility of working on an ambitious project at the service of the general interest and the climate.

In addition, we have decisively promoted the creation of philanthropic networks to address the climate emergency, carrying out a global initiative led by the Donors and Foundations Networks in Europe (DAFNE) and Global Dialogue platforms. Thus, we have supported the creation of the coalition of Climate Foundations, a movement in Spain open to foundations regardless of their scale and mission, to implement changes in the different areas of their action and management. At the end of 2020 there are already 40 foundations that have signed the Climate Foundations Pact, while another 40 are in the process of being signed. Throughout 2021, the group of signatory foundations will work collectively to share the tools that facilitate the necessary transformation of organisations in the face of climate change. In this project, we have also been accompanied during the eight months of gestation by the artist Sofía de Juan, who has created two sets of audiovisual pieces that reflect on this problem.

In France, we have promoted the Coalition française de Fondations pour le Climat, under the leadership of the Centre des Fonds et Fondations (CFF) and in view of the importance of networking, we follow the example of the Funders Commitment on Climate Change pact, promoted by several foundations in the United Kingdom.

We are thus facing a new year, after having put in place in 2020 all possible resources to achieve our objectives, with an unforeseen situation in which to continue supporting initiatives that have proven to be more essential than ever. The actions we have carried out have reaffirmed our will as a Foundation for the sake of philanthropic work, to achieve the transformation of society towards a more ecological and inclusive model and to guarantee its full development.

Image credits: Colectivo “Llámalo H” and Alimentando Córdoba