Children at the Ngobe-Bugle school in Panama

The Foundation's vision is to help the poorest of the world’s poor help themselves and become agents of change in the process of their own development. It strives to bring people of all backgrounds together in service to each other across cultural, national, religious, racial, and economic divides to systematically contribute our human and material resources to help create a world devoid of poverty, war and disease where every member of our human family is an active participant in the process of our communities progress and development.

Mona Foundation does this by identifying grassroots initiatives where local people have stirrings of their own vision of change and have demonstrated the will to take it forward by implementing some plan of action they’ve devised and sustained. In collaboration, they then accompany the development process with assistance they identify as useful for their future progress including funds, technical support, consultation and other resources. They particularly focus on education and raising the status of women and girls, two elements shown to be fundamental to the success and sustainability of development projects. This long term collaboration with projects is unusual for foundations, but has proven to be of significant value in helping raise up capacity in local people who become dedicated, skilled agents of change in their own communities, capable of conceiving and sustaining projects of greater complexity, such as full scale schools and universities.