Moorweg 51
13509 Berlin
Germany
- Democracy and community development
The Shanti Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Berlin. It was founded in 2019 by Dr. Christa Pandey and is dedicated to promoting human encounters in all areas of culture and the idea of international understanding.
Our guiding principle is the personal encounter, exchange and understanding. We support projects that create connection, resonance and meaning. We are effective when new relationships are established between people from different backgrounds and socialisations who would otherwise never have met. We place projects for young people in particular at the centre of our work, as we are convinced that this is where the impact is most sustainable. Supporting humanitarian projects is therefore not a direct focus of the foundation's work.
At the Shanti Foundation, we are committed to making encounters between people possible. We are talking about encounters that are new and surprising as well as encounters beyond our comfort zone.
In view of a perceived divide in many societies, our social interaction is often at the centre of daily news. It is commonplace that mutual understanding, respect and acceptance need to be strengthened. The real challenge lies in recognising and overcoming prejudices that are simply assumed and reproduced. To do this, we need situations of encounter in which people with different perspectives can come together on an equal footing. We need spaces of encounter in which people can have their own positive experiences with each other.
Testing, exploring and researching formats for encounters and contacts that are sustainable is more important than ever. We support suitable methods and tools so that people can influence and inspire each other. In order to bring people into contact in the first place, we support creative approaches to reach them.
We are a small and young foundation that would like to specialise in methods and formats of encounter in the future. Together with our project partners, we would like to become experts in formats that are effective and sustainable. There are many daily contacts and many perspectives in our societies. But we would like to ask ourselves how we can support people in not just shielding or consuming other perspectives, but taking them seriously and respecting them? Within a network that focuses on intercultural dialogue, we can contribute our experience. Every foundation and every NGO has successes, but also failures. We can learn from these instead of making the same mistakes if we know about them from each other.
We are primarily interested in exchange. We would like to share experiences, evaluations and possible scientific findings in contact research. Projects are usually selective and short-term. We rarely know whether and how they have actually worked. We hope that this knowledge will be pooled in a network without being lost.