2022 has been another challenging year, and recent world events have caused a major setback in the effort to fight poverty. Therefore, an even stronger commitment by the Hilti Foundation is needed. Nevertheless, 2022 has also been a year of good progress: We stayed on track with our projects and were able to launch important new initiatives.

As part of Hilti’s corporate volunteering program Engaged Beyond Business, our colleagues are involved in social and environmental initiatives that go beyond their daily work. Numerous local projects are running all over the world, led by the respective Hilti organization. In addition, the Hilti Foundation offers some international initiatives.

After one year of intense preparations, the Hilti Foundation proudly announces its latest initiative in East Africa: For the first time, 120 young people will spend the next two years as an employed apprentice of one of 24 renown Kenyan companies and student of a specialized school, to be educated as a certified plumber or electrician. This dual training model is based on more than 100 years of experience in Switzerland and Central Europe.

Affordable Housing & Technology is one of the Hilti Foundation's focus areas. That involves more than the well-known Cement Bamboo Frame Technology, which provides safe and sustainable homes for families in need. The Foundation also supports the development and implementation of other solutions to improve the way families live and build.

This was a dream coming true for the talented young musicians of the Sinfonía por el Perú Youth Orchestra when they crossed the ocean this late summer: Performing together with world-renowned tenor and founder of Sinfonía por el Perú, Juan Diego Flórez, at three of the most prestigious and important classical music venues.

To promote and expand affordable housing markets, Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter launched ShelterTech, the world’s leading platform for affordable housing innovation, which targets pioneering shelter entrepreneurs. The Hilti Foundation’s support for ShelterTech and the Terwilliger Center’s Shelter Venture Labs puts entrepreneurs at the center of a highly connected ecosystem of collaborative partners.

In August 2022, the Academy for Impact through Music (AIM) gathered 40 students, the so called “Firebirds” for the immersive part of their Fellowship journey. Although the second cohort, this residency was the first of its kind, notably including 40 Firebird Young Leaders aged 13-17. This was no normal ‘orchestral music camp’ - teachers from music for social change programs came from Brazil, the Canary Islands, Colombia, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Uganda and the USA, along with young musicians, music program leaders, expert faculty and staff in Lisbon for over 3 weeks to experiment with transformational teaching and learning approaches.

It is almost a tradition when musicians from the Iberacademy Medellín and their young colleagues from the Stella Privathochschule Feldkirch form the "Pforte Kammerochester Plus" every spring and fall. As part of the chamber music program "Musik in der Pforte", the orchestra will be dedicated to contemporary music as well as the compositions of the great masters, in October 2022 Mozart and Beethoven. In the best chamber music tradition, the ensemble is led by the concertmaster.

The Hilti Foundation and Habitat for Humanity are working together to scale Cement Bamboo Frame Fechnology in Nepal and the Philippines. This innovative building method was developed by Base Bahay Foundation, an organization founded by the Hilti Foundation. The homes built using this technology are constructed with specially treated bamboo and cement plaster that makes them disaster-resilient and sustainable.

1,200 low-income families have found a new home thanks to Cement Bamboo Frame Technology, a disaster-resilient construction solution developed by the Hilti Foundation.

Salzburg – Gstaad – Lucerne. These are the places where the Youth Orchestra Sinfonía por el Perú will give concerts during the last days of August and the first days of September. They will perform together with the world-famous tenor Juan Diego Flórez, who founded the social music program in Peru in 2011, and the Spanish conductor Roberto González-Monjas.

As a global phenomenon, the housing situation of the poor is dramatic: An estimated 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing, and this number will almost double until 2030. Most of them will end up in so-called informal settlements, starting to build by themselves. In Lima, Peru, like in many other regions of the world, housing construction is a long-lasting process, not a purchase. For low-income families in particular, construction costs are often more critical than quality, which impacts the families’ safety and health.

For decades, Hilti team members have shown great compassion by contributing to the communities they live and work in. As a socially responsible company, Hilti wants to support and encourage team members’ social commitment through the Engaged Beyond Business corporate volunteering program. The program was founded in 2020 together with the Hilti Foundation. The goal is clear: to provide every single Hilti team member worldwide with opportunities to participate in social initiatives beyond business.

Imagine, you are a smart girl with big dreams, but you have to leave school because your family can’t afford to pay tuition. Isn’t that unfair? While talents are equally well distributed all over the world, not everyone gets the opportunity to develop and use them. Agnes Wairimu Kagiri is 34 years old, married, and a mother of three who had to re-define herself and her future several times to live an independent and self-determined life.

With Engaged Beyond Business (EBB), Hilti’s employee engagement program, every region has amazing local projects running. Today, we want to focus on Bea’s work: The international EBB projects “building houses”. Back in 2014, the Hilti Foundation accidentally learned about a house building project in Bosnia. "Three months later, we actually went down there with a group of apprentices from Hilti Plant 4 in Austria and after one week we had built two houses", recalls Bea.

To travel abroad and perform at major international festivals is the dream of many young musicians. This dream is now becoming reality for the Youth Orchestra of Sinfonía por el Perú, which is touring Europe for the first time with its founder, the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez.

Based on the Basic Entrepreneur Training (BET) program’s success, the Hilti Foundation has decided to launch “Enterprise Scale Up”, a project focusing on those microentrepreneurs who have already gone through the base program with ambitions to invest and profitably grow their enterprises. Until 2027, the project will reach 20,000 farmers, helping them to improve their livelihoods and to contribute to local rural economy and social development through scaling up their farming-based enterprises in Kenya and Tanzania.

Listen in this episode of In this Case to Werner Wallner (Hilti Foundation), Walter Irungi (small business owner), Dorothea Arndt (Hand in Hand International) and Jane Sabuni (Hand in Hand Eastern Africa) talking about how they partner to reach that goal: Helping people to develop skills, find sustainable jobs, start businesses and achieve a decent income, so they can afford a better living standard.

Habitat for Humanity, a longtime partner organization of the Hilti Foundation, has started to build safe and disaster-resilient homes in Nepal for families in need. Since its inception in 1997, bamboo has been the environmentally friendly and local building material of choice for Habitat Nepal. But the current project is the first in the country to use the Hilti Foundation’s innovative CBFT.

“Side-by-side for a better future” is the motto under which the Academia Filarmónica Iberoamericana, or Iberacademy for short, based in Medellín, Colombia, is embarking on its second tour of Europe. The young musicians of the Iberacademy Orchestra will play impressive programs under the direction of Iberacademy founder Alejandro Posada and Roberto Gonzales-Mónjas, principal conductor of the Musikkollegium Winterthur, Switzerland.