Our Mission & Values
Our family’s values of compassion, care, challenge, and love inform everything we do.
Our Mission & Values
Our family’s values of compassion, care, challenge, and love inform everything we do.
The Altenburg Foundation was created to help others
Using the values, resources and connections we have been fortunate to have available to us as a family, we aim to work with carefully selected partners to expand opportunities for people in challenging circumstances who can have maximum positive impact in their communities.
We do this through collaboration with extraordinary grassroots organisations who serve their communities, usually through education and personal development. Everything we do is informed by our family’s values. We are interested in sowing sustainable seeds for the future, so that individuals, their families and their communities can lead lives with greater well-being and dignity.
Our projects encompass schooling, livelihoods training, personal development, mentoring, sports, technical and human skills development to empower people to have greater choices in their lives. We work with smaller-scale partners who care deeply about and work directly with those they serve, and value highly the personal connections we are able to foster.
To date, the foundation has been operating in several countries and contexts, including:
UK – personal mentoring, individual sponsorship of refugees seeking accreditation of professional expertise. Also personal mentoring and sponsorship of those from lower socio-economic and underrepresented backgrounds.
Syria – we have funded the restoration, reopening and ongoing running of a school in rural Aleppo for five years.
Uganda – we have funded a primary school run by refugees, for refugees since 2018; with our partners on the ground, we are developing the infrastructure for a secondary school, alongside programmes of vocational skills development.
Germany – we have provided operational seed funding for an innovative non-governmental organisation which has secured USD for emergency humanitarian relief work in Ukraine and, most recently, in response to the earthquakes in Syria and southern Turkey.
Lebanon – we support the work of Tuyoor Al Amal schools in Tripoli; they serve the Syrian refugee community there in education from Kindergarten to high school Grade 12. We have funded a summer school programme, and also funded the provision of solar panels and the development of a computer teaching room and library for the more than 2,500 children there. We also support the ongoing professional development of their staff.
Also in Lebanon we are funding for four years the professional development cohort at The Alsama Project in Beirut. This is a pathway scheme developing the English, Maths and technical skills of a group of young adults, alongside courses in ‘soft’ professional skills for employment and personal development through engagement with the natural world.
Transnational – in collaboration with our partners across the various contexts above, we are currently developing a programme of soft skills for transnational, remote employability. We aim to engender skills, attitudes and behaviours, alongside technical training, that will allow displaced people to compete in the global digital economy and find meaningful livelihoods to support themselves and their families.
Working for education, integration and maximum community impact
We work to support grass-roots organisations and individuals who seek to have the maximum positive impact on their communities through a focus on education, integration and society.