Transparency
Phoenix Initiative4 min read
In 2025, its first full year of activity on two continents, Foundation Phoenix received 150,000 USD. This article does something simple: it walks through that sum, budget line by budget line, and says what each line paid for on the ground in Rivera, Huila — a small town in an Andean valley, in Colombian coffee country.
One caveat first, because it matters: the figures below are management figures for 2025, not yet audited. The split still awaits validation, and the audited financial statement will be published once it is ready. We share the working numbers now because we believe you should not have to wait for the formal document to know where the money went.
The 150,000 USD was allocated across our five pillars, plus one line that keeps the whole structure standing:
The largest share went to the land itself. In the second quarter, the first seedling beds of the nursery were laid out; by the third quarter, a planting campaign had linked two forest fragments — the first stretch of our wildlife corridor. On the Huila estate, a hillside was restored over the course of the year; the before-and-after photographs tell that story better than we can.
To make the sums concrete — illustratively, based on 2025 field costs — 20 € covers roughly a dozen native seedlings planted and tracked, and 250 € roughly 1,000 m² of wildlife corridor restored.
The second line funded building work done the way we want to build: with guadua, a bamboo native to the region, and with autonomous water systems. The idea is that the foundation's own structures should demonstrate the practices it stands for — local materials and a sober use of resources.
This pillar funded the first paid training cohort of women from Rivera, which started in the second quarter, and the culture workshops that opened in the villages in the third — including our "classrooms without walls". As orders of magnitude from 2025 field costs: 50 € corresponds to one training day for one woman of the cohort, and 100 € to one month of workshop materials for a classroom.
Nothing glamorous here, and nothing optional either. This line covers accounting, legal filings in both countries, and hosting. It is also what made the two-continent structure possible: in the first quarter of 2025, our French antenna — Fondation Phoenix Initiative France, an association loi 1901 based in Vielle-Aure — was registered, so that donations can now be received in both Europe and Colombia.
This line supported the women's sport programs and the healthy-table programs — the part of our work that is about bodies and daily life rather than trees and buildings. It is unspectacular, regular work, and that regularity is precisely its value.
The smallest line pays for telling the story honestly: field stories, this journal, and community radio. It is deliberately modest — we would rather plant than advertise — but silence helps no one, least of all the people doing the work.
By the fourth quarter, the accounts were closed on 150,000 USD, every pillar had been funded, and the 2026 program was secured. For donors who want to know how the money travels: a pledge on the site is answered by the team by email with secure bank-transfer instructions, followed by a tax receipt — no card data passes through the site.
To repeat what we said at the top: these are management figures for 2025, not yet audited. The audited statement will be published, and if it differs from the working split above, we will say so plainly, in this same journal. That is what open books mean to us.
TransparencyIn 2025, 18,000 USD — 12% of what the foundation received — went to accounting, legal filings in two countries, and hosting. What that line pays for, and why we publish it instead of hiding it.
3 min read
TransparencySince the first quarter of 2025, Phoenix has had two legal homes: a Colombian foundation in Rivera and a French association in Vielle-Aure. Here is what that structure means in practice if you want to support the work from either continent.
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