50 years of Franciscan Relief Work
The initiator of the terrAssisi-Fonds, the Franciscan Mission Centre in Bonn – the relief organisation for human dignity worldwide – is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As the international relief organisation of the Franciscans, the MZF supports more than 650 relief projects per year in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In the spirit of the Franciscan tradition, the mission of the MZF is to offer material and non-material aid worldwide. This is more than just collecting money, which is then distributed as alms. Rather, it is also about promoting a creative and participatory consciousness in a Franciscan spirit, which critically seeks to uncover the causes of worldwide poverty and injustice in order to remedy them by rethinking and changing the structures that cause them. Ultimately, the aim is to encourage a civilization of solidarity through material aid. When supporting the projects, care is taken to ensure that they are not imposed in a colonial style, but are considered necessary by the local people themselves, planned and then implemented with the support of the MZF. The focus is on helping people to help themselves, a culture of sharing and the formation of a community spirit, as well as the willingness to engage in dialogue.
This solidarity-based approach also includes the identification and initiation of economic alternatives, such as the formulation of ethical criteria for capital investment and their concrete implementation in sustainable investment funds initiated by MZF and launched in cooperation with Ampega. An initiator fee is then paid to support aid projects.
Franciscan Note 