Tondo Foundation

ABOUT THE FOUNDATION

Name: Tondo Foundation

Website: http://www.tondofoundation.org

Manifesto

Tondo Foundation is a platform for people with skills and ideas. We align our capital and resources in the best way we can to work with others to achieve their goals. We don’t believe in silver bullets or easy answers, but rather that critical thinking and hard work can achieve real results for people. 

We support teams that confront social issues head on in places where change is needed. We look for individuals and teams that understand the context and have the skills to deliver. We provide the resources they require to design, iterate and scale.

We aspire to align our resources in their entirety to achieve our mission. We invest our time and our capital with intentionality and we expect our partners to do the same. We aim to continue thinking critically and revising how we do this in practice.

Mission

We exist to build and scale solutions that work.

We look for partners that understand the challenges their communities face and are driven to build lasting, effective solutions. We define scale as the intention and ability to include all the people that face a problem or need in a specific community, region or country. 

We support individuals and teams to iterate their ideas and implement their solutions. We are agnostic on whether our partners are non-profit organizations or for-profit social enterprises; we care about supporting models that work regardless of their legal structures or revenue models.

We focus on South and Southeast Asia in the following thematic areas:

•     Healthcare: to increase access to affordable and quality healthcare for low income communities;

•     Education: to increase access to quality education for children and youth in public schools and, when necessary, in alternative learning settings;

•     Social Welfare: to enable children and youth to live safely and with their families;

•     Human Rights: to ensure the rights of refugees, migrants and minorities are protected and they are able to live safely in host countries or, ideally, in their country of origin.

•     Enterprise: ecosystem building and revenue generating models for social innovation

Philosophy

We believe that capital alone cannot satisfy the demands that our partners face.

We focus on creating long-term partnerships by providing strategic support, operational support and access to networks in addition to financial support.

We aim to achieve our goals and support our partners to achieve their goals by:

·        Fostering Talent: we support others to develop their skills, knowledge and networks in order to tackle big challenges successfully

·        Being Patient: we partner in designing and iterating solutions in order to prepare our partners to scale

·        Taking Risk: we are not afraid of failure, although we do try to understand and mitigate risks

·        Leveraging Networks: we aim to collaborate across philanthropic, investor, and partner networks

·        Enabling Trust: we listen to the concerns, needs and ideas of our partners and share our own in a transparent and direct way

·        Developing Goals: we develop long-term strategies and outcomes directly with our partners by focusing on collaborative goals

·        Encouraging Iteration: we try to give our partners financial flexibility to adapt to the needs they understand best

Evaluating Impact: we rely on our partners’ indicators and, when required, support them to develop new metrics, keeping in mind that they have the knowledge of the local context and needs