Fondazione Zegna Key Projects

Social Projects:

Care & Share

Fondazione Zegna has supported Care & Share, in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India, since 2004. The objectives of this project are focused on:

• Improving the quality of people’s lives within particularly disadvantaged Indian communities through projects which encourage self-sufficiency.
• Providing education and care for underprivileged Indian children, who are often orphaned or abandoned.
• Alleviating the difficult economic and social conditions within communities, whilst developing the ethical and cultural potential of individuals.

Nina's Home

“Nina’s Home” is a 500 square meter house financed by Fondazione Zegna and located within Care & Share’s Butterfly Hill village for HIV positive children and AIDS orphans. Nina’s Home will accommodate 50 children, with their helpers and will be equipped with an infirmary and a dispensary for the drugs necessary for treatment.

Atelier Zegna

Together with Care & Share, Fondazione Zegna established the Atelier Zegna tailoring school in 2002 to train young people from Buddavaram. Atelier Zegna has the dual aim of ensuring self-sufficiency and contributing to the process of vocational training for young people.

Children’s Nutrition Project

In 2011, Fondazione Zegna and the Zegna Group funded the purchase of 9 acres of rice fields for Care & Share in the Indian region of Andhra Pradesh. Each year Care & Share distributes more than 5,000 daily meals of rice and vegetables and through these new fields around one quarter of its annual rice is provided.

Zegna-Mika-Der Children's House

The Mika-Der Foundation is a charity that aims to improve the living conditions of children who have suffered sexual abuse or family violence by offering them the opportunity to live in safe and organized structures. The project seeks to help these children become part of society by giving them support in the fields of education, sports, music and theater, as well as in the area of psychology. In support of this program, Fondazione Zegna has pledged to completely furnish two children’s houses that would be home to 12 children in the Turkish city of Van.

AMREF – Water, Health and Education

Water is a key to social and economic development in some of the world’s poorest countries. Fondazione Zegna has been working with AMREF’s (African Medical and Research Foundation) Water and Health Program since 2003 to reduce poverty in East African village communities by improving access to drinking water through the construction of aqueducts, water tanks and numerous wells, and by implementing forestation programs – thereby helping to reduce malnutrition and combat diseases linked to inadequate hygiene and sanitation.

Instituto Rio

Set up in 2002, Instituto Rio is a non-profit organization operating in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, an area of some 47,000 hectares. Instituto Rio works on; Fondazione Zegna chose to support the Fondo Permanente VPJ, a private investment fund run by a committee of experts. Profits of the fund are channeled into community projects including Orquestra Sinfônica Jovem de Campo Grande, which aims to develop the musical sensibility of the local community’s young.

Medical Research Projects:

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – Fighting Infantile Leukemia

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is a non-profit organization working on the research and treatment of leukemia in children “whether or not their families can pay the cost.”

In 2006, Fondazione Zegna joined St. Jude in the fight against infantile leukemia, launching an important and innovative project to develop a therapeutic protocol for certain pediatric tumors that is applicable throughout mainland China. This protocol is being specifically designed for children suffering from leukemia who come from poor families.

The collaboration between St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Fondazione Zegna and the Chinese hospitals shows how China is receptive towards a fund raising culture capable not only of alleviating serious deficiencies in these hospitals but above all of fostering dialog and knowledge transfer on a national and international level, which will have beneficial effects on the pediatric health system in the country as a whole.

CREAThE ONLUS

CREAThE ONLUS is a non-profit association committed to improving the quality and availability of safer conception options to couples affected by HIV and/or other transmissible infections who wish to become parents. CREAThE helps HIV-affected couples to use reproduction techniques that enable them to conceive biological offspring and reduce the risk of transmitting HIV to new born babies or non-infected partners.

Environmental Projects:

WWF China - The Panda Corridor

The Panda Corridor, WWF China’s biggest project, involves a vast effort to protect pandas in the Qinling Mountains by linking conservation activities to the promotion of eco-tourism so that local communities can develop socially and economically.

Fondazione Zegna has been providing continuous sponsorship of the Panda Corridor project since October 2004. The sponsorship covers four aspects of work in the field: eco-tourism promotion, conservation-based sustainable community development, giant panda monitoring and patrolling, as well as conservation awareness raising and communications.

FAI – Safeguarding Italian Heritage and Environment

FAI (Fondo per L’Ambiente Italiano) is a non-profit foundation set up in 1975 for the protection and development of Italy’s environmental and cultural heritage. For many years Fondazione Zegna has shared in FAI’s mission: to promote a culture of respect for nature, art, history and tradition in Italy and to safeguard a heritage that is a fundamental part of our roots and our identity. In 2009, Anna Zegna joined the board of directors of Fondo per L’Ambiente Italiano.

Together, Fondazione Zegna and FAI have saved and given new life to various treasures of the Italian landscape, including the planting hundreds of thousands of bulbs, blossoming shrubs, and perennials, as well as 160 olive trees in the land opera by Michelangelo Pistoletto entitled ’The Third Paradise’.

Zegna New Born Forest

The ‘Zegna New Born Forest’ project was launched in 2011. For every new born child of the Zegna Group’s 7,000 worldwide employees, a new tree will be planted in the Oasi Zegna starting with the planting of 180 trees that represent Zegna babies born in 2010.

Cultural Projects:

Mariinskij Theater

Fondazione Zegna’s collaboration with the Mariinskij Theater began in 1997 with the establishment of the "Zegna and Mariinskij New Talents Award," a scholarship program that provides four scholarships a year to young talents in the Mariinskij Theater enabling them to continue their musical and theatrical studies.

Fondazione Pistoletto – Cittadellarte

Several years ago, Fondazione Zegna embarked on a venture of creative collaboration with Cittadellarte– Fondazione Pistoletto. This bore fruit in the form of the “Habitus Zegna Cittadellarte,” an innovative model for cultural investment based on shared commitment to responsible creativity, on the part of both art and business. Every year, Ermenegildo Zegna funds a scholarship through UNIDEE - Università delle Idee di Cittadellarte, which hosts young creative from all over the world.

All’Aperto Contemporary Art Project

Promoted by the Fondazione Zegna, the ALL'APERTO (‘OUTDOORS’) project curated by Andrea Zegna and Barbara Casavecchia, was conceived with the intention of making contemporary art and its values increasingly accessible. Since 2008, has supported the realization of a series of site-specific permanent artworks, created in the area of Trivero by established international artists.

The artist invited to carry out the first intervention of ALL'APERTO was Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938), who framed the perimeter of the panoramic terraces of the Lanificio Zegna with the installation ‘The Coloured Weathervanes, Work in Situ, 2007, Trivero’; a rainbow of 135 flags waving in the wind, according to a sequence of seven colors between green and blue that optically meld into a single but ever changing iridescence, depending on the light.

Italian Stefano Arienti is the featured artist of the 2011 edition with his “working sculpture” entitled I Telepati (Telepaths), that is distributed on the territory in two ways: as new technology released in the environment (through Wi-Fi signal coverage) and as a physical sculpture (large river rocks that have been carved and painted).