Connecting lenders with borrowers needing capital to grow socially responsible initiatives and enterprises
1.
who we ARE
The Vidar Foundation is a registered Canadian charity which connects individuals wishing to use their money in positive ways with borrowers needing money to grow socially responsible enterprise. We facilitate investment in sustainable agriculture, education, health, cooperatives, and other areas. Vidar Foundation is administered by a board of directors inspired by the socioeconomic ideas of Rudolf Steiner.
LINK:
2.
LENDERS
We focus on working together as a community, investing in what is of human value to make a balanced financial profit, social benefit, and healthy cultural life.
We promote success and manage risk by establishing a direct personal relationship with the lenders and borrowers, whom we are willing to support because we believe in the worthiness of their project and their ability to succeed.
With Vidar Foundation you can safely use your savings to help the world heal.
Where are we going?
We seek to expand our base of investors and worthy initiatives.
We would like to create an alternative way for people to use their savings in a conscious and socially constructive way. Banks, RRSPs and mutual funds all invest our money in corporations that place profit ahead of environmental and social costs, and have no moral duty except financial gain. We want there to be a way that we as individuals can place our savings in projects that we believe are valuable and will make our world a better, more humane place for all. We don’t have to give our money to banks to profit from, if there is a reasonable alternative that is safe and fiscally responsible. We want to help create a new way of moving capital that connects borrowers and lenders without the bank profiting in the middle.
Our money can help the world heal.
What have we done?
Vidar Foundation’s aim is to build trust in cooperative efforts by establishing openness with transparency and respectful negotiation.
The relationship with the lenders as well as with the borrowers is of paramount importance because contact has to be cultivated with those who are willing to let their money work in a socially healthy way, and also to encourage the borrower’s pursuit of their worthwhile endeavour. Personal familiarity with what moves the borrowers to undertake their projects is the core of Vidar Foundations Mission so that everyone involved can wholeheartedly embrace the spirit and substance of the proposed project.
How do we do it?
We have connected socially minded investors with social initiatives seeking loans.
We focus on working together as a community, investing in what is of human value, to make a balanced financial, social, and cultural profit.
We promote success and manage risk by establishing a direct personal relationship with the lenders and borrowers, whom we are willing to support because we believe in the worthiness of their project and their ability to succeed.
ABOUT VIDAR FOUNDATION
Vidar Foundation is a registered charity which assists future oriented and socially responsible initiatives working in the fields of education, health, environment, sustainable agriculture and cultural life.
Basing itself on the indications of Rudolf Steiner, social philosopher and scientist of the early twentieth century, Vidar Foundation fosters initiatives that work for the benefit of the whole community.
Vidar Foundation provides a channel for individuals who wish to assume full responsibility for the way in which their money works by assisting projects that are creating social benefit.
Vidar Foundation facilitates communication between investors and/or donors and project initiators, fostering collaboration and partnership.
Vidar Foundation invites inquiries regarding opportunities for investing funds and supporting a qualified project through donations, loans or planned giving such as a legacy.
Vidar Foundation offers assistance in formulating a business plan, applying for loans, and setting up pledge or loan guarantee communities.
Vidar Foundation’s aim is to build trust in cooperative efforts by establishing openness with transparency and respectful negotiation.
The question of who exactly Vidar was to the pre-Christian Norse and other Germanic peoples is essentially unanswerable.
In Norse myth, Vidar is the son of Odin and the giantess Grid. He is the god of silence and revenge, the second strongest of the gods. At the destruction of the world, Odin will be killed by the wolf Fenrir, or Fenris, and Vidar will avenge his father by killing the wolf with his bare hands. He will press one foot on Fenrir's bottom jaw, and will take hold of his other jaw and tear the wolf apart. He is one of the gods that will rule the new world when it is created
The gods rely on him in times of immense difficulties.
Vidar’s "thick shoe" is described as consisting of all the extra leather pieces that people have cut from their own shoes at the toe and heel, collected by the god throughout all time. Therefore, anyone who is concerned enough to give assistance to the gods should throw these pieces away.
The Vidar Foundation seeks to find a new way of working with money, by enabling individuals who wish to assist new ventures to connect with those entrepreneurs and initiatives that will develop socially responsible projects. Through Vidar Foundation these lenders put their “extra leather pieces” at the disposal of those whose needs could be seen as “immense difficulties” in order that they can carry out their work. The Fenris wolf might be viewed as the materialistic drive for profit that permeates much of economic life today and whose power to rule much of the world’s activities needs to be countered by an impulse that will lead to the “new world.”
THE NAME VIDAR
Who was Vidar and why is he an inspiration for Vidar Foundation?