Dear all,
Solid House Foundation has worked passionately the last few years to achieve its goals of improving habitat in developing countries. Unfortunately, we had to make a decision to discontinue the activities of our organisation. Despite great commitment from the employees, the Supervisory Board, The Committee of Recommendation, the members of various think tanks and volunteers (altogether more than 100 people), we are unable to continue. It was a very difficult decision to make and we will still need time to process its full impact.
SHF has received a lot of support for its mission and vision. We have worked on the subject of ‘habitat’ as a healthy and good house, which could be inhabited in a sustainable and safe way. It had to be financially achievable and surrounded with adequate infrastructure: water and sanitation, economic growth and community development. We wanted to provoke a major mentality change as to the financial possibilities of sustainable development. It was our goal to shift the concept of ‘help’ to the idea of ‘investment’.
SHF has, during almost 8 years of its existence, established a sizeable network and accumulated a tremendous amount of expertise and proved to be an innovative development organisation. Key in our approach:
- structural and sustainable development
- promoting entrepreneurship
- making use of locally available resources and environment-friendly building techniques
- broad understanding of the improvement of living conditions and communities using a frame developed by SHF: “Comprehensive Approach To Community based Habitat” (CATCH)
We have worked extremely hard and we have invested a lot of energy into an innovative development agenda and practice by implementing Credit Based Housing (CBH). SHF combines expertise areas of finance, insurance and habitat, among others. Through this, we have built bridges between parties, which could have had an enormous impact on the development world: creating opportunities (as in our logo) in practice,
We are convinced that by applying CBH we show more respect for wishes and talents of our target groups, through which we would contribute to a better habitat in developing countries. There is certainly a lot of interest in our approach which will be followed up, but unfortunately right now we are not able to proceed with our mission.
There are enough perspectives and there are parties that would gladly co-operate with SHF. Unfortunately, also these organisations are going through a difficult time and cannot afford to invest into strategic partnerships with SHF.
Current market, changing political climate thanks to the Dutch government of Prime Minister Rutte (working to the disadvantage of development sector) and world-wide economic crisis are factors that have made it impossible to sustainably finance the operations of SHF.
The times will change, we will get a chance to reflect upon the years gone and think of the years to come. On behalf of SHF I would like to use this opportunity to thank you all for the cooperation, the trust and energy that you have all so willingly shared with us.
Kind regards,
Wim Stroecken
Director Solid House Foundation
Utrecht, February 28th, 2011