Southwestern Advantage Foundation begins the new year with a new Chairman of the Board

Our vision is to create the largest sustainable charity fund in Eastern Europe that supports the development of young people. We want to grow the fund’s assets as efficiently and transparently as possible, constantly providing an overview of the good deeds done, investments and future plans.

The current Chairman of the Board, Sander Sildver, has been leading the Foundation for the last 6 years, during which time the fund’s assets have increased 5-fold and more than €14,000 worth of scholarships and grants have been issued for various projects:

Sander has done this work with all his heart, and continues on the Board helping to organize the annual Greete Poderat Young Athlete Scholarship.

Madis Raud, who has 15 years of experience in various roles in the Southwestern Advantage organization, will take over the active management of the Foundation from February. Madis started working with Southwestern Advantage in 2007 by selling books door-to-door, which, to his surprise, he managed relatively successfully, and a casual summer job turned into a very long and successful career. While developing his sales and management skills in the SW summer program during university years, he built an international sales team of 20-30 members and was promoted to sales manager. In total, Madis worked in the Southwestern Advantage summer program for 11 years, mentoring and helping young people get the skills and character to be successful in life. During this time, Madis graduated with bachelor’s degree in informatics at the University of Tartu and a master’s degree in entrepreneurship at the Estonian Business School.

Currently, Madis is responsible for the partnership relations of the European division of Southwestern Advantage and leads the US J-1 program alumni organization BridgeUSA Estonian Alumni Association. In addition, he is actively engaged in investing, real estate portfolio management, accounting and Estonian Defence League. Given Madis’ background and experience, we are confident that the Southwestern Advantage Foundation will continue to be in good hands.

Plans and goals for 2024

In cooperation with major Baltic universities, Southwestern Advantage Foundation has announced the Southwestern Advantage Entrepreneurial Youth Scholarship competition. We plan to regularly offer enterprising students in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the opportunity to apply for scholarships of 1,000 to 2,000 euros to support students with their studies and ventures. In Estonia and Lithuania, applications for scholarships take place already in February:

In Latvia, we plan to organize the corresponding competition in the fall. Traditionally, we’ll also open the annual the Grete Poderat Young Athlete Scholarship in April.

Despite the change in leadership, the Foundation continues to follow its mission to grow into the largest investment-based charitable foundation in Eastern European countries, which helps young people acquire knowledge and develop character so that they can fulfill their dreams in life. We help young people in Europe get a better business education and share investment knowledge with those who do not have the opportunity to do so. We work to reduce and prevent poverty. We have set ourselves the goal of achieving at least 10% annual return from the fund’s investments. This allows us to allocate 5% of the fund’s volume to various scholarships and charitable deeds every year, and at the same time continue to grow the fund’s assets. In this way, the donations will continue to do good forever. We have set a goal to increase the volume of the fund’s assets to €300,000 by 2030, which would enable us to issue scholarships and grants worth €15,000 each year – this is almost the same as the combined scholarships and charitable projects in the first seven years of operation.

In order to meet this goal, we need to double the number of month-to-month donors, be able to grow the fund’s assets by a minimum of 10% per year and keep fixed costs below 5%. Considering the almost 3-fold increase in the price of the auditors’ service, this is not easy to achieve, but we believe that it is definitely possible in the long run. In investments, the goal is to increase the proportion of assets with passive and regular payouts and to reduce the proportion of growth stocks in the entire portfolio on an ongoing basis.