Creation of VIVA Trust
Founder’s Comment - Stephan Schmidheiny
In my successful career as business entrepreneur I have always tried to see my business as part of society and to look for opportunities inherent in social evolution.
For two years of my life as I participated in the process leading up to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 I worked almost full-time on trying to understand how we could conceptually overcome the traditional view that economic development and conservation of nature where at odds with each other. As a result of this process we coined the term “eco-efficiency” describing a common denominator of economic development and wise resource use.
The Earth Summit experience made me re-think my own life. Rather than just going back to developing my own business interests I wanted to experiment looking for more sustainable forms of development in real life. Putting a substantial part of my personal wealth to work I had a chance to do this on a big scale. I founded AVINA which in just a few years has established itself as a leading actor for social change across the Latin American continent.
At the same time I was building up a group of Latin American companies committed to responsible management measured at the triple bottom-line -economic, social, and environmental success- as well as in quality and markets. Today, GrupoNueva is recognized among the leading multinationals in promoting this progressive concept.
Once again, I was facing the challenge of combining two concepts which the traditional view sees as distant and unrelated: business and philanthropy. In my search for experiences that combined the two in synergistic ways I found only very few convincing and proven models none of which would fit our particular set of circumstances.
Once again, I set out to innovate and experiment. The result is VIVA Trust: An irrevocable Trust owning the business and supporting social entrepreneurs who work together towards a shared vision of a better society based on a shared set of values. (Hence the name VIVA: VIsion and VAlues).
VIVA Trust is an open-ended learning experiment of how to collaborate across what is traditionally considered a deep divide. Business and philanthropy work according to rather different concepts. But I am convinced – and this is the hypothesis of the VIVA Trust experiment – that they have a huge and largely untapped potential for developing synergies in shaping a better society for future generations. This is all the more important in societies where nations and governments are facing many more and bigger challenges than they have capabilities to effectively address them.
The success of the VIVA Trust experiment will be found in its continued progress in developing these synergies and showing results benefiting the people of Latin America. These people will ultimately be the jury of whether they feel that my vision was right and whether the experiment was carried out in ways useful to them.
Symposium: Entrepreneurship, philanthropy and development: Walking the talk
INCAE. October 9, 2003
