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Vision

The Gireloup foudation has been active for ten years now. We started ten years ago with great enthousiasm and a lot has happened since then. In good and bad times, and with striding understanding we have had to make choices and adjust our vision. How our vision interacted with our experiences and vice versa, can be read in our annual reports. Here we would like to state our current vision.

We are a small foudation that wants to make a creative contribution to a changing world.

The two projects we realized, finca Codeso in Costa Rica and the choir of the dome in Kaliningrad in Russia, emerged from the idea that in economically underdeveloped countries a small foundation can make a bigger imprint than in the riches of The Netherlands. The millenium goals inspired this thought.
Last year we looked at the result of the projects so far on the basis of our mission statements. Fighting poverty proved to be no longer part of the mission but was integrated in the concept that if people have work that pays a fair amount of money, they do not live in poverty.



The mission of the project in Costa Rica is to create an ecological circle: from seed to tree to furniture. This all within the scope of cultivating and maintaining nature reserve, focussing on biodiversity. By making a nursery, an ecopark, a test area and a workshop we are there. It will take a while though before we can thin out our plantings for usage.

The Costarican government is very strict about cutting trees and exporting tropical wood. But the demand for tropical wood is big and it is expected to stay that way.
Teakplantation are an answer. But plantation aren't nature. And monkeys don't want to live there.
Teakplantations offer their investors a 10 % profit. We believe that if people would settle for a little less money in exchange for a little more nature, a new balance can be found between the needs of people and nature.