Emirates Foundation Board of Directors Meeting Highlights Importance of Reaching Sustainable Financial Position

• His Highness Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan chairs annual board members meeting
• Meeting discussed progress and achievements of past year

Abu Dhabi, UAE - 28 June, 2015: His Highness Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of Emirates Foundation, presided over the annual meeting of the Board of Directors of Emirates Foundation, an independent philanthropic organisation set up by the Abu Dhabi government to facilitate public-private funded initiatives to improve the welfare of people across the UAE.

The meeting was attended by His Highness Sheikh Theyab Bin Mohamed Al Nahyan, Board member of the Emirates Foundation, His Excellency Sheikh Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, Managing Director of the Emirates Foundation and Her Excellency Sheikha Lubna Bint Khalid Al Qasimi, Minister of International Cooperation and Development as well as other board members and focused on the progress and achievements of all Emirates Foundation’s programs this year.

In particular, the board members highlighted Takatof’s recent engagement of 400 youth at EXPO Milano in Italy and this year’s Think Science Fair, which attracted 10,000 visitors and engaged more than 1400 youth. The meeting also noted the Sharjah Volunteer Award that was won by the Foundation’s SANID Volunteering programs, the progress around embedding financial literacy into the UAE national school curriculum and the launch of the second edition of the Emirates Award for Arabian Gulf Youth which engages youth from across the GCC in developing ideas for social enterprises.

Speaking at the meeting, His Highness Sheikh Abdullah stressed the importance of creating a sustainable social impact that can deliver positive and permanent outcomes for young people in the UAE.

He said: “Our venture philanthropy model, which involves incubation, piloting, scaling up and then spinning off of programmes, is proving very successful and we have a lot to be proud of. Our focus and business based approach whereby we are essentially creating social enterprises, is really bearing fruit but there is still a lot to be done.

“Our mission is to guide, inspire and empower the UAE youth and our work is about ensuring that each one of our programmes is delivering high impact, is run effectively and is cost effective. We have a proven model and various ways of supporting young people but we still need to scale up so that all young people in the UAE have access to guidance.

“As we continue to build long-term financially sustainable programmes we hope to significantly improve the scale of our impact.”

Sheikh Abdullah also praised the private sector for the “generous support they have provided to Emirates Foundation’s programmes.”

“I would like to thank everyone who has supported us to date and I look forward to seeing many more private sector companies offering their support in the future, to help us realise our vision of supporting and empowering youth,” he added.

The other participants in the meeting were His Excellency Abdul Rahman Bin Mohammad Nasser Al-Owais, Minister of Health, His Excellency Obeid Al Hairi Salem Al Ketbi, Board Member of Emirates Foundation, His Excellency Mohammad Hassan Omran Al Shamsi, Board Member of Emirates Foundation, Mohamed Hamed Ghanim Al Mehairi, Board Member of Emirates Foundation, Frauke Heard-Bey, Board Member of Emirates Foundation, Muna Al Gurg, Board Member of Emirates Foundation and Her Excellency Reem Yousef Al Shammari, Director - Strategic Communications Affairs Executive Affairs Authority.

Emirates Foundation was launched in April 2005 as an integrated national initiative that seeks to invest in UAE youth through a strategy that uses the model of venture philanthropy to develop nationwide programs that aim to impact the lives of UAE youth positively and permanently in a manner that is measurable and sustainable.