Who we are
Introduction to the world of the Costa Family Foundation
The Costa Family Foundation is a Non-Profit Organization of Social Utility aimed exclusively at the pursuit of solidarity and charitable purposes. It is headquartered at Str. Col Alt 105, 39033 Corvara in Badia (BZ).
Founded on February 14, 2007, by the will of the Costa Family, it was registered in the register of ONLUS in the same year. In 2024, it will submit an application for registration with the RUNTS, as required by the new Third Sector Code, and consequently, it will acquire the status of ETS (Third Sector Entity).
The Foundation operates as a grant-making organization: through fundraising, it finances social projects that are developed by active local partners in developing countries (Ethiopia, Uganda, Togo, Afghanistan, and India). These projects mainly target children and women living in conditions of hardship or emergency, with particular attention to the protection of linguistic and cultural minorities.
"Leave the large roads, take the paths." This quote from the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras seems to aptly represent the guiding principle of the Costa Family Foundation’s work: small steps, a slow journey that facilitates observation without the need for dominance.
The purpose of the Costa Family Foundation is the promotion and protection of the rights of minors, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and of women in developing countries. The Foundation allocates its funds to international cooperation projects related to psychological, social, educational, and socio-health assistance, as well as all other forms of support and relief.
The objective of the Costa Family Foundation is to respond to humanitarian and environmental emergencies in rural areas of developing countries through projects driven by principles of dignity, autonomy, transparency, and responsibility. The Foundation is non-profit and aims to bring added value to the communities in which it operates. Activities are carried out personally by long-standing project partners to exclusively satisfy the interests of the beneficiary communities and contribute to solving the problems afflicting individuals and their families in the intervention areas.
Many voices tell our story. Stories of political repression, repression of one's culture and language. Stories of distant countries, of literacy to be enhanced, stories of denied rights. Stories of those eager to act and those who, thanks to a handshake, come closer to their future. These are our stories.
In a society where everything has become a commodity, and where those with money can buy and be better off, there is a need for the rehabilitation of the 'free', of that which can be used but not bought.
Alexander Langer
Parents and children. A story as long as the world, which here unrolls on the mountain slopes to jump far and wide without stopping. A family always on the move and forever anchored to its starting point: the Dolomites. A family with a broad outlook and a broad smile, which infects and involves, which does not leave indifferent, because it has never believed in indifference.
Annie and Ernesto create the Hotel La Perla in Corvara in Badia (BZ) in 1956. Then they create Michil, Mathias and Maximilian. And the years roll by, chasing each other through childhood, adolescence, youth and maturity. There is a strong bond, however, that unites everything. Like the Dolomites and Tibet, for example. On one side prosperity, and a nature to be safeguarded from over-consumption, there a people in exile. In between, an idea of the mountains as a territory of shared peace. It is from the meeting in India in 2007 between Michil and his wife Joe with Madame Jetsun Pema, sister of the 14th Dalai Lama, that the idea of creating a non-profit foundation was born, which would carry out its activities in the field of cooperation in favour of the populations of developing countries.
'The person who sets off on a journey is not the same person who comes back', goes an oriental proverb; and it is precisely from that journey that the will to create a bridge between worlds that are distant but subtly very close was born: from minority (Tibetan people) to minority (Ladin people), from mountain (Himalayas) to mountain (Dolomites).
The will became reality on 14 February 2007. And it is still in the making. A family is born that operates as a community; family that expands beyond its original nucleus, that comes to life by opening up like the petals of a flower. Family as a common good.
A group of people who manage goods and resources in common, distributing possibilities in a concrete manner, leaving the logic of the individual to open up to others. A group of individuals who want to create bridges and not walls, starting from the bottom to look up and fly beyond the Dolomites, towards distant shores. An extended family, of collaborators, volunteers, of friends whom we call by name: Sister Patrizia, Marcella, Daniele, Mariam, Francesca, Buze and all the supporters, thanks to whom small tangible things, and for this reason big, are possible.
A seed, a tree, a sheep, a medicine, a school, which, thanks to constant work to raise awareness and education, we can begin to decline in the plural, from India to Afghanistan, from Uganda to Togo via Ethiopia.