2025 marked 20 years since the founding of Adessium Foundation. Much has been learned and achieved over all those years. Time to look back and reflect on that journey.

What’s important to you?

The Adessium story begins with its founder Gerard van Vliet. Work hard, keep developing, and always strive to improve, that’s his guiding principle. After building his own successful asset management company, he sells it in 2002. The decision to donate a significant proportion of the proceeds to charitable causes is taken without any hesitation.

Gerard: “Our approach to life is that having sufficient financial resources gives peace of mind, but having too much can be a curse.” In 2005, the family establishes Adessium Foundation, which has since donated an average of over 16 million euros to charity each year. That’s a serious endeavor, taking up a lot of time and energy. Identifying trustworthy organizations capable of effectively managing large donations is a challenge in itself.
Chairman and son Rogier van Vliet: “If you’re giving away a hundred thousand euros, or even more, then the question is: what’s important to you? Does the recipient have a compelling story and an effective approach?”

A car for the harvest

The family goes looking for good causes that appeal to them. Rogier and Gerard hear about a man who supports projects in Africa. One of them is a farmer who needs a car to transport his harvest to the nearest harbor. Through a NGO, the farmer is given the money to buy a car. Initiatives close to home also need help. For example, Gerard suggests supporting icons of Rotterdam, the city where he lived and studied.

The ideas for charitable causes vary widely. A problem almost all family foundations encounter when they first get started, is that family members involved have different preferences, explains Gerard. “Asking yourself ‘what do I want’ can drive family members apart. The temptation for each family member to set up their own foundation is an obstacle you need to overcome.”

Financial services

Gerard and Rogier have clearly defined roles. Gerard concentrates on managing the finances, while Rogier focuses on exploring the sector: who are the players, what ideas do the family want to develop further? He soon gets the idea of taking a businesslike approach. “I started viewing philanthropy as a form of financial services, with a portfolio of charitable causes. And just as you want institutions you invest in to achieve good results, we want our grantees to do that too, but then in the form of social impact.”

Gerard and Rogier spend a great deal of time discussing what Adessium stands for. Gerard: “You want to help others, but who should you help and for how long? The question keeps coming back to yourself: what do I actually want to achieve? If you keep adopting other people’s projects, you’re not setting your own direction, you’re just saying yes or no.” Over time, Gerard and Rogier learn that the key is to define their own course and seek out causes that align with it.

Being able to take action

One of their first deliberately and independently chosen donations focused on the fight against malaria. Rogier: “I read a newspaper article about successful scientific research into biological control of malaria mosquitoes. So we got in touch. It turned out that more research was needed and we decided to support it. This way, you take the initiative to build your project portfolio yourself.”

Since the establishment of Adessium, Rogier looks at the world differently, for example when he reads the papers. “Previously, I accepted the news as an inevitable reality. Now I ask: what can we do, for instance when it comes to human rights? It gives you the sense that you can actually take action.”

The first employees

As the family does not have a clear plan for the donations in the early years, Gerard and Rogier wait before hiring people. Rogier: “If you want to support medical causes, then you might want to hire a medical person. But if you’re more interested in humanitarian aid then you need to find someone who knows about that. If we don’t yet have an answer to the questions that new employees will ask us, then perhaps we’re not ready to start recruiting.”

In 2007, after thinking long and hard on those initial questions, Adessium decided it was time to start recruiting. They hire Pieter Stemerding, at that time working at the World Wildlife Fund, and lawyer Carst Joustra. They are needed to help achieve the family’s ambitions: making more donations and establishing and expanding the organization in a professional way. Carst: “They needed capacity and brainpower to help with this.” Pieter: “We invested a lot of time in thinking about what the family did and didn’t want.”

Together with Rogier, Pieter and Carst set out to learn from other philanthropic organizations and experts in the philanthropy sector, in the Netherlands and abroad. How do they go about things? Carst: “Should you closely monitor the partner organization’s activities? Or should you let a grantee go its own way and then evaluate impact towards the end?”

Strategy

During this period, the institutional nature of the donations developed: not just funding individual projects but supporting organizations as a whole. Pieter: “That was relatively new in the Netherlands. But it actually seemed pretty logical to us. If you just fund a specific project, then you tie the recipient down. We turned it around: we support organizations in their broader work and development because we believe in their mission and ambitions.”

Another milestone was the decision to establish a strategic framework; a clearly outlined plan on which Adessium bases its course. Pieter: “It helps you to take logical steps in a responsible manner. It also clearly shows the outside world what you do and don’t do.”

Taking risks

For each topic, Adessium tries to strengthen both day-to-day practice and the policy framework in which that practice operates. Rogier: “If you only support policy change, you risk becoming too detached from what’s happening on the ground. But if you only support fieldwork, then you start to wonder: what am I really achieving with this, especially in the long term?”

This approach also involves a willingness to take risks. After all, philanthropic money can be deployed with greater risk or flexibility. Of course, things don’t always work out. For example, a campaign by Oceana didn’t have the anticipated effect. Oceana is an organization working to protect the oceans and campaigning against pollution and overfishing. With support from Adessium, they lobbied the World Trade Organization against harmful fisheries subsidies. In the end the campaign didn’t achieve the desired impact.

Despite this, Adessium decided to support Oceana again, this time to facilitate Global Fishing Watch, a platform that provides transparency on who is fishing when and where, making it possible to see whether marine protected areas are being respected. That initiative developed into a great success. Pieter: “If you never do anything that might go wrong, it’s rare for something really good to happen. Let alone something exceptionally good.”

The strategy Adessium supports around ninety charitable organizations that fit within the fund’s strategy. But, as program director Martijn Meijer explains, Adessium doesn’t operate from an ivory tower. “We get our information through civil society organizations. Our strategy on issues like combating poverty is based on ideas developed in civil society and in academic research.” General director Rogier van der Weerd: “We believe in the power of people building something together. Well organized civil society organizations are essential to a robust democracy and a strong society.”

Defining success

An important insight that the team gains over the years is deciding on how much funding they provide to an organization for how many years. Providing too much funding creates the risk of the initiative being over-financed, leading to high-dependency on one funder. Director Rogier: “Providing too little funding is also detrimental, as then you leave an organization struggling with limited budget and they are unlikely able to achieve their ambitions.”

Whether the support given to a good cause has been successful can’t always be measured objectively. A common saying in philanthropy is: “Not everything that counts can be measured. And not everything that can be measured counts.” Broadly speaking, the partnership is a success if an intervention brings about positive change.

Lizzy Eilbracht, responsible for strategic learning and impact at Adessium: “An example would be support for urgent needs in a city. People can apply for support for small but urgent things, like glasses for a school-age child whose parents cannot afford them. The needs don’t disappear; we actually see a systematic increase in applications in many cities. Despite this, the initiative provides value in several ways. Of course it makes an immediate difference to those who receive help, but it also sends a broader signal: it gives a voice to people in need and strengthens the argument for structural solutions. In that sense, it functions a bit like a canary in a coal mine, raising political awareness of wider societal developments.”

Support and advice

The program managers bring a huge amount of expertise to their conversations with partner organizations. Martijn: “We’re not only interested in what progress is being made, but also in the challenges that organizations face. We hope we create an atmosphere in which partner organizations feel able to talk about any problems or setbacks they encounter and find a solution together.”

Many nonprofit organizations go through a difficult phase at some point, generally when the organization starts to grow. Issues emerging at that stage relate for example to the relationship between the founder and the growing team, governance and professionalization of the organization. Director Rogier: “We don’t hesitate to talk to the partner organization about this: we can see that you’re entering a phase in which this is an issue. Get support and advice from people who have experience with this.”

Partnering and forming networks

When Adessium believes that it’s important to provide support for a particular theme, we look for several organizations focusing on that issue. We support them individually, based on the belief that together they will form a strong network and be able to make more impact collectively. Martijn: “Chemical pollution is a good example. We started funding a broad group of environmental as well as health organizations each working in its own way to prevent environmental pollution and health problems caused by chemical pollution.”

Adessium also tries to coordinate effectively with other foundations to support civil society organizations. This can be achieved through structural collaboration, for example in a pooled fund where multiple donors bring together their resources and expertise so it can be used to jointly finance a specific theme. Martijn: “You can make a lot more impact if you combine those philanthropic budgets and decide on a common strategy.”

Alongside donations, Adessium also provides other kinds of support. Lizzy: “We look to see where we can connect, strengthen or transform organizations. Focusing on organizational development means sectors become stronger, with greater capacity for change.” One of the ways Adessium connects organizations is through peer-learning groups, where partners get together and learn from each other. Lizzy: “This support doesn’t involve direct funding, but it does strengthen the sector.”

A diamond

Inevitably, after twenty years we ask ourselves what Adessium has achieved. Besides the many impactful initiatives there is also success on other levels. For example, over time Adessium has built ‘convening power’, grounded in its expertise, network, and reputation. On several occasions the organization has succeeded in getting parties, sometimes even organizations competing for funds, to sit down together. Chairman Rogier: “We aim to always offer a safe environment where we can discuss agendas and sometimes financial issues too. I believe it’s important that we keep playing this role. Because coordinating civil society organizations has such a powerful effect.”

And what does Adessium’s future look like? Will the foundation keep doing what it’s doing now? Chairman Rogier: “Someone once said to me that every generation has its own philanthropists. I think that’s a nice idea. What we have is something really special, which we have the privilege of looking after. I look at it as if it’s a diamond, something precious that you get to carry with you for a while, polish and then you pass it on again.”