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The Aventis Foundation

The Aventis Foundation

The Aventis Foundation is a non-profit foundation headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Established as the Hoechst Foundation in 1996 with foundation assets of DM 100 million, it was renamed the Aventis Foundation in 2000.

The Aventis Foundation is an independent foundation with legal capacity under German civil law. It finances the projects it promotes and its administrative expenses with the earnings generated by its foundation capital.

The Aventis Foundation only supports projects; it neither has nor runs its own projects. Since its establishment, it has invested more than € 40 million to support project partners.

What we support

The Aventis Foundation supports projects in the areas of art and culture as well as science and higher education.

Artistic and cultural support focuses on individual innovative projects by cultural institutions that, for instance, experiment with new formats, seek to attract new target groups or pursue new avenues in aesthetic education. Projects that further aspiring young talent as well as the Rhine-Main region and Berlin have emerged as thematic and regional areas of focus.

In science and higher education, the Aventis Foundation supports foundation and visiting professorships as well as two scholarship programs for doctoral candidates and university lecturers. Special emphasis is placed on supporting projects that link research in the fields of chemistry, biology and medicine.

What we don’t support

Scholarships apart from our doctorate or lectureship scholarship program. The German Chemical Industry Fund (www.fonds.vci.de) runs these scholarship programs. It is not possible to apply to the Aventis Foundation for a scholarship.

Personal financial assistance for educational, training or cost of living expenses or to meet the costs of medical treatment, sickness or nursing care.

Financial subsidies such as printing or travel expense subsidies, support to attend conferences and congresses, for translation work as well as for continuing education and training.

Commercial (not charitable) projects or events by individuals, agencies, companies or institutions.

Construction, renovation or building conservation measures.

Projects that do not relate our areas of promotional focus such as mass education, social policy, social welfare, development aid, environmental protection and conservation efforts.

Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees advises the Foundation and makes the key decisions concerning its projects. Its main tasks include defining guidelines for the investment of assets and stipulating the focal areas of the Foundation’s activities.

Jürgen Dormann (Chairman)
Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. h.c. Uwe Bicker
Prof. Dr. Jean-Marie Lehn
Dr. Heinz-Werner Meier
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Klaus Pohle
Dr. Bernd W. Voss
Prof. Dr. Günther Wess

Board of Management

The Board of Management is responsible for the operational management of the Aventis Foundation.

Dieter Kohl (Chairman)
Eugen Müller (Managing Director)

 

Annual Report for 2010 – More funding for culture and science

In 2010, the Aventis Foundation increased the total amount used to support projects thanks to another year of good earnings from its financial investments and an increase in the value of the Foundation’s assets. In addition, 2010 marked a special occasion: the Rolf Sammet Fund of the Aventis Foundation celebrated its 25th anniversary.

In 2010, the Aventis Foundation supported projects in the areas of culture, health as well as science and research with a total of € 1.6 million, which compares with € 1.4 million in 2009. Promoting aspiring young talent in the fine arts as well as scientists in the research areas of chemistry, biology and medicine formed a special area of emphasis.

Further key developments during 2010 were:

Consequently, in 2010 the Foundation initiated new projects while also continuing and extending successful multi-year projects. While the amount spent to support projects and the value of the Foundation’s assets both increased, administrative expenses declined.

Culture

Professional work to promote aspiring young talent
In a three-year partnership, as of the 2009/2010 theater season, the Aventis Foundation is supporting all the local and global premieres performed at Schauspiel Frankfurt, which Oliver Reese started directing as of this season. With this project, the Foundation is supporting young artists and new formats that address contemporary themes. This enables Schauspiel Frankfurt to include young drama, world premieres and piece developments in its program, giving aspiring young authors, in particular, possibilities in the theater.

The eXperimente series, which was launched on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Aventis Foundation in 2006, added a further five cultural projects to promote aspiring young talent in 2010. Specifically, these were concerts by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, theater and art projects in cooperation with school students and adolescents as well as educational initiatives by the Museum for Modern Art and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.

As a result, a total of 24 initiatives are now being supported in the Rhine-Main region which expose children and adolescents to cultural topics, enabling them to develop an interest for art, music or literature and offering them inspiration and possibilities to develop their personalities. The projects are proposed by a jury and are selected by the Board of Management of the Aventis Foundation. Each project receives up to € 50,000 as a one-time funding amount.

The highly successful eXperimente series will continue in 2011 with six further projects. The selected cultural projects were presented to the press in Frankfurt in November 2010. The initiatives within the eXperimente series promoted to date continued to receive communications support and advice during 2010. Press releases were issued on individual events or exhibitions by the eXperimente partners, assistance was given in designing, posters, flyers, etc., and joint photo opportunities and press briefings were organized. A monthly project report informs all the partners about the highly diverse and varied activities underway within the expanding eXperimente network.

Since 2004, financial support from the Aventis Foundation enabled the Frankfurt Opera to regularly realize a repertoire of unconventional musical theater pieces such as baroque opera or contemporary and experimental pieces at the Bockenheimer Depot, a satellite venue. This six-year, highly successful cooperation with one of Europe’s best opera houses ended in 2010 with the expiration of the funding agreement.

The Aventis Foundation has also been supporting the Lucerne Festival on a long-term basis. The Aventis Foundation has been one of the supporters of the Lucerne Festival Academy since its formation in 2003. The Academy is directed by Pierre Boulez. In a summer course of several weeks’ duration, it offers around 140 highly talented young musicians from around the world the possibility to focus on contemporary music. Daily rehearsals and workshops give the participants the necessary tools to interpret new music. The course is concluded with an orchestral concert during the Festival.

In 2010, the Aventis Foundation also supported the Ensemble Modern, the Frankfurt Opera, the World Doctors Orchestra, the Orchestral Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, the Academy of the Arts in Berlin as a member of the society of friends, the Germany Academy for Language and Poetry, the Goethe Festival Week in Frankfurt am Main, as well as further cultural institutions and projects.

Health

Fight against tuberculosis in South Africa
The TB Free project to fight tuberculosis in the Republic of South Africa has been running since 2001. As of the end of 2010, it had trained more than 40,000 assistants to become patient supporters. They attend one-week courses held by TB Free project trainers, who teach them how to help locally with the lengthy treatment of people with tuberculosis.

TB Free operates a center in each of the country's nine provinces. The centers are equipped with communications technology and vehicles in order to organize and conduct the training of these patient supporters in clinics, community centers, companies, mines or other social hotspots such as prisons. In 2009, a dedicated, uniform system to evaluate the work of TB Free was developed and deployed.

A second focal point of TB Free is educating and informing the public about tuberculosis disease and treatment. This includes door-to-door campaigns to distribute flyers and hold personal discussions as well as the professional use of mass media. Increasing use is being made of radio advertisements in the ten official national languages. Posters and newspaper advertisements are also being used. TB Free is participating in national campaigns set up by the health ministries and in road shows. The objective of the awareness campaign is to eliminate the stigma of TB and to minimize the further spread of the infectious disease, and to prompt people with suspected cases of TB to obtain a diagnosis and ultimately successful treatment.

Together with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Aventis Foundation is promoting TB Free by investing approximately € 15 million – donated by Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland – on the project. According to the status at the end of 2010, the funds will make it possible to continue TB Free until the end of 2011. The intention is to continue the project in cooperation with the South African health authorities and to maintain the TB Free centers that have been established in the most heavily affected regions of the country.

Education and Science

Interfaces between chemistry, biology and medicine
Within the scope of an Aventis Foundation chair for chemical biology, the Aventis Foundation has been promoting two professorships in the Biosciences Department of Goethe University of Frankfurt since 2007. The Foundation-endowed chair will permit interdisciplinary cooperation in the biosciences. Building a bridge between biology and chemistry holds the promise of new medical realizations in researching previously incurable diseases.

As of the end of 2009, the Aventis Foundation chair for vascular medicine and tumor angiogenesis, established in cooperation with the University of Heidelberg/Mannheim and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, had been in existence for five years. The chair is dedicated to research and teaching in the area of blood vessels and focuses particularly on their role in the growth of tumors. As contractually agreed, an international scientific evaluation was performed in 2010 in order to decide on the envisaged continuation of the project. Based on the positive expert assessment, the Aventis Foundation is supporting the project for a further five years.

In addition, as part of its education and science activities, the Foundation supported the Robert Koch Foundation.

In 2010, the lectureship scholarship and the doctoral scholarship of the Aventis Foundation were granted for the first time within the scope of the scholarship programs of the German Chemical Industry Fund in Frankfurt am Main. Both scholarships will be financed by the Aventis Foundation over the long term. They are primarily aimed at candidates who are conducting research in the fields of Chemistry/Biochemistry. The Chemical Industry Fund will select and support the candidates. This agreement on organizational cooperation was entered into in order to ensure a high standard of expertise for this promotion of top talent and to sustainably minimize the administrative expense at the same time.

Both scholarship programs derive from the Karl Winnacker Fund and the Hoechst Study Fund, which for decades granted scholarships to scientists who had qualified as university professors as well as students pursuing Master’s and doctoral degrees.

The guest lectureship granted by the Rolf Sammet Fund of the Aventis Foundation in cooperation with Goethe University of Frankfurt celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2010. To mark this occasion, in October the University of Frankfurt jointly organized with the Aventis Foundation a symposium in the Chemistry department. Professors Jean-Marie Lehn, Gerhard Ertl and Venki Ramakrishnan – three Nobel Laureates and former Sammet guest professors – held lectures in a university lecture hall filled to capacity with students and guests. An anniversary publication on the 25 Rolf Sammet guest professors, which is also available on the Web and accessible for research purposes, documents the successful history of this high-caliber scientific funding project.

Facts & Figures 2010

In 2010, the Aventis Foundation invested around € 2.25 million in activities conforming to its Articles of Association. This figure also includes amounts to support projects to which a definitive commitment was made in 2010. Payments to project partners in the course of 2010 were € 1.6 million. This does not take the TB Free project into consideration because it is being financed by a donation from the company Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland. In 2010, € 352 thousand were spent on the administration of the Foundation.

Since its establishment in October 1996 and up until the end of 2010, the Aventis Foundation has spent € 25.6 million on activities conforming to its Articles of Association. This corresponds to approximately € 1.8 million per year. Together with the health project TB Free, a funding volume of € 40.1 million results. Administrative expenses during this period totaled € 5.7 million.

 

An independent, supporting foundation

The Aventis Foundation supports projects and uses the earnings from its foundation capital to finance itself. At the end of 2010, the core assets of the Aventis Foundation amounted to € 53.0 million and the special assets of the Rolf Sammet Fund totaled € 0.6 million. The annual financial statements for 2010 show total assets of € 58.4 million.

On December 31, 2010, the Aventis Foundation had financial assets and bank balances totaling € 58.2 million. Of this amount, more than 80% were invested in bonds, covered bonds, and fixed-interest loans.

Audit

PSP, a German accountancy firm (Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft) based in Munich, was appointed to audit the annual financial statements for 2010. The auditors conducted their audit of the annual financial statements in accordance with Section 317 of the German Commercial Code (HGB) and Section 12 para 2 of the Foundation Law of the German Federal State of Hesse as well as in compliance with the German generally accepted standards for the audit of financial statements promulgated by the German Institut der Wirtschaftsprüfer. Their audit did not give rise to any objections.

Contact

Frankfurt office
Aventis Foundation
Industriepark Höchst
D-65926 Frankfurt/Main

Claudia Rohlfing-Langer
Tel.: +49 69 305 137 72
Fax: +49 69 305 805 54
claudia.rohlfing-langer@aventis-foundation.org

Berlin office
Aventis Foundation
Pariser Platz 6
D-10117 Berlin

Eugen Müller
Tel.: +49 30 284 724 854
Fax: +49 30 284 724 855
eugen.mueller@aventis-foundation.org

Administration of the Aventis Foundation
DSZ - Maecenata
Pariser Platz 6
D-10117 Berlin

Thomas Ebermann
Tel.: +49 30 2838 79 00
Fax: +49 30 2838 79 01
thomas.ebermann@dsz-maecenata.de