Foundation for Future Generations

Legally registered in March 1998, the Fondation pour les Générations Futures is an independent national non-profit foundation. The foundation collects and manages funds to support various initiatives. It is the only grantmaking foundation in Belgium dedicated exclusively to sustainable development.

Founded in 1998 as a public benefit foundation, the Foundation for Future Generations is pluralist, independent and active in all three regions of Belgium. Benoît Derenne is its founder and executive director.
As a platform for transformative philanthropy, it enables its partners, donors and philanthropists to invest in future generations. The Foundation is exclusively dedicated to the transition of our society towards a sustainable development mode.
Its resources come from a wide variety of organisations (public and private, for and non profit ones) and individuals (as donors, volunteers). As a foundation created with a small endowment, it has always both conducted fundraising activities and worked in partnership with others, using its endowment as a leverage to help leverage additional resources.
The foundation’s activities are mostly operative ones, although grantmaking has been a rapidly expanding part of its activities in the last few years, mainly through hosted funds.

Mission

To identify and support projects, and implement original ideas and actions that take into account both tomorrow’s challenges and today’s emergencies.

Aiming at contributing to pass on a liveable world to future generations, the Foundation for Future Generations is exclusively dedicated to the transition of our society towards a sustainable development mode, meeting the needs and challenges of a sustainable and viable society for all, today and tomorrow, locally and globally.
Facing the complexity of this endeavour, its mission is to promote a multi-faceted, systemic approach, simultaneously considering 4 dimensions: people, planet, prosperity and participation. and to strengthen capacities of others in this respect.

Geographic Focus

Belgium

Programme Areas

The Foundation for Future Generations aims at incubating, supporting and attracting public attention to concrete and pioneering examples of ‘sustainable development put into practice’.
The Foundation is convinced that it is possible to pass on a liveable world to our children, if we act and think “360°-wise”, simultaneously considering 4 dimensions (4 P’s): People, Planet, Prosperity and Participation.
It integrates this transversal approach across its main programme areas, focusing on key societal drivers of change rather than specific themes:
• Think 360°-wise: It prepares students and researchers to think 360°-wise by valorising master theses, PhD theses and research that integrate this approach;
• Act 360°-wise: It inspires its fellow citizens – especially the younger generations – to act today 360 ° by stimulating, supporting and valorising social entrepreneurship and concrete actions;
• Invest 360°: It invests consistently with its values (sustainable & impact-first financial investments), and promotes ‘citizens finance’;
• Participatory democracy: It promotes G1000-like deliberative sortition-based processes.

In order to bring this about, the foundation provides the following means:

• Grantgiving
• Think-tank
• Operations

Grantgiving
Seeks to enhance the capacity of local initiatives that bring tangible added value to the sustainable development of society.

Think-tank
Seeks to facilitate the development of new concepts which contribute to creating a society that is more united and sustainable. This is done through:
• Acting as a convenor, bringing together Acts as a convener, bringing together the non-profit, business and public sectors. It serves as an active but impartial intermediary to encourage and facilitate debates and cooperation among different stakeholders, to build confidence and respect between groups with very different views
• Developing the University Prize for Future Generations, which makes scientific advances in the area of sustainable development accessible to a much wider public.
• Producing publications on topics such as micro-finance, education or supported projects.

Operations
Promotes innovation in the field of citizen participation and citizen democratic control in the development of society. Towards this end, the foundation has staged two citizens’ panels; one on territorial development in the Walloon Brabant province, and the other on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s).

The foundation pursues its objectives through an ethical and committed management of its capital.