The 2026 program: continuity over promises

January invites announcements. It is the month when organisations publish targets, unveil ambitions, and put numbers on a year that has not happened yet. This article is our version of that exercise, and it will disappoint anyone looking for bold figures. Deliberately so.

How 2025 closed

In the fourth quarter of 2025 the foundation closed its accounts on 150,000 USD received over the year. Every one of the five pillars was funded, and the 2026 program was secured. (As throughout this journal, the 2025 figures are management figures, not yet audited; more on that at the end.)

Behind that closing line sits a year that built itself quarter by quarter. In the first quarter, the French antenna — an association loi 1901 based in Vielle-Aure — was registered, making donations possible on two continents. In the second, the nursery's first seedling beds were established and the first paid training cohort of women from Rivera began. In the third, the wildlife-corridor planting linked two forest fragments, and culture workshops opened in the villages. The fourth quarter closed the books.

What "secured" means

We chose the word carefully. "Secured" does not mean expansion, and it does not mean a leap. It means continuity: the five pillars — ecological restoration; eco-responsible infrastructure; art, culture and education; well-being and healthy living; media and outreach — enter 2026 with their work funded to continue. What began in 2025 does not stop for lack of means.

For a young foundation, this is the achievement that matters. Projects that depend on living things and on people's trust are damaged less by modest budgets than by interruption. A nursery that pauses loses its seedlings. A training cohort that pauses loses its momentum and, worse, its credibility. Continuity is what turns a promising first year into a practice.

What continues

Concretely, the work of 2025 carries straight into 2026:

• The nursery keeps raising native seedlings in the beds established in 2025, feeding the restoration planting on the estate — including the hillside whose before-and-after photographs this journal has shown — with each planting tracked over time.
• The wildlife corridor that linked two forest fragments continues to be tended, its plantings followed season by season.
• The workshops continue: the culture workshops opened in the villages, and the "classrooms without walls" approach that goes with them.
• The training continues: the paid cohort of women from Rivera goes on, on the same principle as before — that training is work, and is paid as such.

Around these, the other pillars keep their course: the guadua-construction and autonomous-water work of the infrastructure pillar, the women's sport and healthy-table programs of the well-being pillar, and — through this journal, field stories, and community radio — the media pillar that documents all of it.

Where the targets would normally go

This is the point in a program article where you would expect numbers: how many seedlings in 2026, how many square metres of corridor, how many workshop sessions, how large the next cohort. We are not publishing any.

Not because there is no plan — the program is secured precisely because the work is planned. But the foundation prefers to publish results over promises. A target costs nothing to print and something to walk back; a result, photographed and counted after the fact, needs no walking back. Where a 2026 target would normally appear in this article, expect instead a results article later in the year, once the thing has actually happened.

The audited statement

One commitment for 2026 does deserve to be stated in advance, because it concerns accountability rather than ambition. The 2025 figures cited here and across this journal — the 150,000 USD, the split among the pillars — are management figures, not yet audited. The audited statement will be published once the review is complete, and this journal will link to it plainly.

That, in the end, is the 2026 program in one sentence: continue everything, promise little, and show the accounts.