2021: The path to the resilience needed for our world and for future generations

This new year invites us more than ever to mobilize, to remain united and to demonstrate our solidarity in the face of today’s immense challenges. As a foundation of general interest, our response is to work day after day in favour of a greener, more inclusive transformation that allows for full development. Like this hand, whose lines of life merge with the waterways of the Amazon, we believe in a society that places people and the Earth at the center of its project, that invites responsibility and attention to others. For the Foundation, Citizen Art and Sustainable Food contribute, through their extraordinary transversalities, to this desirable future that allows each individual person to operate, both individually and collectively, in favor of change.

Side by side

Side by side we go further and move faster. Now, more than ever, collective intelligence and action are indispensable, particularly in the face of the climate emergency and the goal of social justice. In 2020 we initiated and organized several unprecedented collective initiatives in the philanthropic sector in France, Spain and at European level in collaboration with DAFNE: the Coalition française des Fondations pour le Climat with the CFF and the #FundacionesPorElClima movement with the AEF.

In addition, in all our programs we accompany a great diversity of people and projects along the paths of transformation. We encourage the crossing of different disciplines and approaches and collaborations with the aim of promoting the emergence of innovative solutions. The Social and Solidarity Economy is one of the paths we take to bring together different energies and forces. In 2020 we carried out and published a participatory study on the issue in Spain. In France, we explore the prospects for the development of SSE through the prism of Sustainable Food.

Finally, in our daily work, the Foundation never intervenes alone, so we would like to express our gratitude to the experts who accompany us and who help us on a voluntary basis with the aim of making our actions as relevant as possible. In 2020 the Executive Committee welcomed Bochra Benachour and Diego Garcia-Vega, two talented and highly motivated young members. His enthusiasm and experience will be invaluable over the next few years to share a fresh look at the Foundation and the world of tomorrow.

Accelerate the transition

2020 has marked the moment to look at our decade of existence. It has been 10 years of actions with 80 million euros for 1000 grants. It has been 10 years of meetings, sharing and reflection on our two areas of interest: on the one hand, the food transition towards a model that respects people and ecosystems and, on the other, the development of art as an engine of citizenship to generate a sensitive and critical view of the world and strengthen the cohesion of society. always with the utmost respect for diversity.

The crises we are currently facing consolidate our conviction that Sustainable Food and Citizen Art are relevant and essential levers of transformation to respond to the climate emergency and the mutations of our world. Now we intend to accelerate the changes that we consider possible, necessary and urgent.

As a result, we have been working for several years to align our investments with our social mission, an ambitious commitment to multiply our social and environmental impact and which we shared for the first time in 2020 in a public report and webinar.

In the midst of the food crisis, we reacted quickly and deployed an unprecedented plan to support our collaborators in difficulty, the artists, as well as to accompany the most vulnerable groups following the example of our programmes to combat food precariousness. Today, we maintain our commitments and continue to support those who embody the will to transform society by sharing their experiences and ideas.

The future is in our hands

For the year 2021, we also want to retain the ability to wonder. Despite the seriousness of the challenges we face and the exposure of our fragilities and uncertainties, we want to help everyone find the energy they need to continue creating, dreaming and imagining.

In the face of the profound changes that each of us is experiencing both in the personal and collective spheres, we have the opportunity to reinvent our ways of living, of being, of consuming, of producing and of sharing with each other.

We found this opportunity last year in the paths – or lines of life – that were outlined through their actions by the five winners of the first edition of our Committed Artist Award, the art education projects at school within the framework of the PEGASE and PLANEA programmes and the mediation and cultural democracy initiatives in the Hauts-de-France region and throughout Spain. This opportunity is also present in the paths initiated by farmers willing to share the ecological transition and the nine territories mobilised within the framework of the new TETRAA programme in France, by the thirteen cities of the SAT programme and the national agroecology network in Spain, as well as by the two projects awarded in the Food For Good Challenge. And, over the next year, we are sure that this same opportunity will resurface in the paths that outline the future winner of the Daniel Carasso Fellowship, the always fruitful exchanges of the Sustainable Food Meetings and all the initiatives full of meaning and promise to which we will give our accompaniment.

In 2021 we will roll out new maturely designed programmes with multiple partners in France and Spain. Climate mobilization will be one of the cornerstones of these activities: the Foundation is determined to further develop its commitments and to mobilize and bring together all those who want to make a difference.

We don’t have much time left for 2021 to chart the path to the resilience needed for our world and for future generations. That path is in our hands, let us share it with hope and joy.

Let’s go there. Let’s get to work!

With our best wishes.
The Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.

Discover our desire for tomorrow, what drives us and our values here.

Illustration and artwork: © Luna Bengoechea
Video © Don Worry