Fundación Avina

Fundación Avina is a Pan-Latin American philanthropic foundation established in 1994 by Swiss entrepreneur Stephan Schmidheiny to promote sustainable development across Latin America and the Caribbean. The foundation is headquartered at Ciudad del Saber, Clayton, in Panama City, and operates through a regional network of offices spanning roughly twenty Latin American countries. Its current programmatic structure is organised around six thematic areas — biomes, climate, democracies, inclusive circular economy, labor innovation, and water — and its institutional identity has shifted progressively across the 1990s and 2000s from a Schmidheiny-personal-philanthropy vehicle into an endowed Latin-American-governed foundation funded through the VIVA Trust, to which Schmidheiny transferred his Grupo Nueva shares in 2003. Valeria Scorza serves as Fundación Avina's CEO, having taken up the role in 2024; she also chairs the Board of Avina Americas, the Delaware-incorporated nonprofit sister entity that supports Avina-ecosystem programmes outside the United States and is led by Executive Director Paula Ellinger.

A 1994 Schmidheiny endowment carrying a Pan-Latin American mission

Fundación Avina's relationship to its Swiss founding is the defining structural fact of the organisation. Schmidheiny established Avina in 1994 to promote business and social leadership for sustainability in Latin America, and in 2003 he created VIVA Trust by donating his shares in Grupo Nueva — the umbrella of his Latin American productive investments — to fund the foundation and a paired social-enterprise investment company. The governance structure of VIVA Trust is legally independent from Schmidheiny, which is what enabled the deliberate handover of Avina's governance to an independent board and a Latin American leadership team in the 2000s and 2010s. The result is the structurally distinctive shape Avina occupies inside Latin American philanthropy today: a Swiss-fortune-endowed Pan-Latin American operating foundation whose governance, leadership, programmatic decisions, and offices are firmly Latin-American-anchored, with no equivalent in the corpus's existing funder slice.

The foundation operates as part of a deliberately multi-entity ecosystem. Avina Americas, the Delaware nonprofit, is a separate legal entity that supports programmes conducted by Avina entities outside the United States — the structural mechanism by which US donor flows and US-tax-deductible philanthropic capital can reach Fundación Avina's regional programming. Avina also maintains a Swiss-based parent, Avina Stiftung, but the public-facing Pan-Latin American operating arm and the entity that carries the foundation's regional civil-society mandate is Fundación Avina. The corpus entry anchors on Fundación Avina rather than on Avina Stiftung or Avina Americas because Fundación Avina is the entity through which the Latin American civil-society and digital-rights grantmaking visible to the rest of this graph actually flows.

AI-good footprint

Fundación Avina's most consequential AI-good footprint is built through its co-founding strategic-direction role in the Initiative for Digital Rights in Latin America (Indela). Indela was launched in 2019 as a USD 1.5 million three-year pooled fund "established under strategic direction from Fundación Avina, Luminate, and Open Society Foundations, with additional support from the Ford Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)", and operates as the principal pooled philanthropic instrument resourcing Latin American civil-society organising on digital rights. Indela's own about page names Avina-side Program Coordinator Sara Fratti and Luminate Steering Committee representative Gabriela Hadid in its current leadership, alongside an Advisory Council of Latin American digital-rights practitioners (Adriana Labardini, Carlos Cortes, Paulina Gutierrez, Ramiro Alvarez Ugarte, with Guilherme Canela as International Observer). IDRC's own project record for Indela corroborates the funder-coalition structure and the Pan-Latin American digital-rights mandate. Indela's three overarching goals — equipping digital-rights actors, promoting collaboration between organisations, and strengthening coordination among funders and organisations in the region — speak directly to the kind of regional civil-society scaffolding the corpus's Derechos Digitales, Coding Rights, Jamila Venturini, and Decisiones automatizadas en América Latina entries already document on the work-product side.

The second AI-good thread is institutional: on 12 September 2025 Fundación Avina announced its internal artificial-intelligence policy, positioning the foundation as "one of the first organizations in its sector to adopt an internal policy on the use of artificial intelligence." The announcement frames the policy around three commitments — that technology must respect human rights, must promote equity, and must contribute to sustainable futures — and around the constraining principle that "AI is a support tool and never a replacement for human decision-making." Implementation runs through consultancies, working groups, dialogue spaces, and training sessions, with Julia França of the foundation's Futures Directorate carrying the public-facing framing. This positions Avina among the small set of foundations that have moved beyond external grantmaking on AI ethics to internal institutional self-binding, and complements the foundation's external Indela work by signalling that Avina's strategic-direction role on AI is grounded in its own institutional practice.

The third thread is more peripheral to the AI-good register but worth recording: the foundation runs the Becas ColaborAcción collaborative-research-journalism grants programme in partnership with Fundación Gabo and Latin Clima, framed around the "information as a public asset" register and run as recurring rounds on specific Latin American beats. The grants' substantive themes have run across water access, habitat, and other sustainability-and-collaborative-impact topics rather than primarily on AI; the programme matters to this entry as a sustained Avina-anchored civic-information-and-journalism investment rather than as an AI-grantmaking vehicle in its own right.

Position in the corpus funder slice

Within the funder slice of this corpus Fundación Avina fills several structural slots none of the existing entries occupies. It is the first Latin-America-headquartered and Latin-America-governed foundation entry of any kind: the existing funder cluster runs heavily US-headquartered (the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the Omidyar Network, the Democracy Fund), with one Continental European entry (Stiftung Mercator), one UK entry (Nuffield Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust), one international entry headquartered in London (Luminate), one Africa-administered re-granting fund (African Digital Rights Fund), and the European multi-funder pooled vehicle (European AI & Society Fund) — and no entry south of the Equator outside the African case. Avina closes that Latin American gap entirely and is also the first Spanish- and Portuguese-language philanthropic-vehicle anchor and the first Swiss-fortune-anchored entry of any kind.

Structurally Avina is closest to two existing entries in different respects. Its strategic-direction role in Indela mirrors the African Digital Rights Fund's structural function as a regional pooled re-granting vehicle reaching civil-society actors that the field's largest grantmakers find hard to fund directly — though ADRF is hosted at CIPESA rather than being the convening funder itself, where Avina sits at the convening-funder side of the comparable Latin American instrument. And its co-founding role in a multi-funder regional pooled vehicle mirrors the multi-foundation co-founding of the European AI & Society Fund by Luminate, Stiftung Mercator, Open Society Foundations, the Mozilla Foundation, and others — the parallel Avina-and-Indela arrangement is what the European pooled vehicle looks like when redrawn for Latin America, with Avina playing the Latin-America-headquartered convening-foundation role.

Where the existing funder slice gives the corpus a window onto how US-fortune-anchored, UK-fortune-anchored, and European-foundation philanthropy resources civil-society work on AI, Fundación Avina is the corpus's principal window onto how Pan-Latin American philanthropy — Swiss-endowed but Latin-American-governed and Latin-American-staffed — resources the regional digital-rights ecosystem the corpus's existing Latin American work-product entries already track.