Presentation of Umanotera

Umanotera, The Slovenian Foundation for Sustainable Development was established in 1994 by Mrs Vida Ogorelec Wagner, a determined activist for changes in the society. Since April 2004 she is the president of the Umanotera’s board, where she continues to contribute to the mission of Umanotera. The name Umanotera itself represents what Umanotera stands for: Umano (human) and tera (terra – earth) - balancing the human society with the environment and promoting ethics in our attitude towards nature and the environment.

MISSION
The fundamental mission of Umanotera is to implement the principles of sustainable development in practise, particularly those aimed at preserving natural resources and biological diversity, i.e. balancing the human society with the environment and promoting ethics in our attitude towards nature and the environment.

OBJECTIVES
The Foundation set the following objectives:

• To conduct and co-finance the promotion of principles of sustainable development;
• To co-finance the projects of nongovernmental organizations in the field of environmental protection;
• To provide advisory services to nongovernmental organizations in the field of environmental protection;
• To conduct and co-finance educational programmes for nongovernmental organizations in the field of environmental protection;
• To award grants for studies in the Foundation's field of activity in Slovenia and abroad;
• To participate in the formation of the National Agenda 21 for Slovenia;
• To implement activities towards protection of public health;
• To protect consumers’ rights;
• To set up and promotion of the fair-trade system;
• To cooperate with domestic and foreign organizations having similar objectives.

PROGRAMMES AND PROJECTS

In the ten year period Umanotera implemented various projects in the field of sustainable development. We started our mission by implementing the Rio SD Summit’s objectives. Umanotera supported the establishment of local Agenda 21, which for many years aimed to introduce the sustainable development concept on the local level. Some of the publications from this project are popular even these days. After this project Umanotera continued to implement national and local projects all focusing to protection of our fragile environment and preservation of values leading to better society. In the last couple of years we focused more on waste prevention, GMOs and chemicals.

In the period 2000-02 we implemented an interesting project Green Monitor with aim to expose a considerable gap between the declared commitment to sustainable development and the implementation of such legislation and measures. We evaluated and compared pre-election programmes by different political parties from the aspect of protection of the environment, nature and sustainable development, and showed through the analysis how insufficiently these issues were included in the pre-election programmes that were to establish the direction of development for Slovenia from 2000 to 2004. The analysis was published and a summery was prepared in English as well:  ostrzek_summary_2.pdf  98.21 KB  29.07.2005 10:38 

More on the situation in the area of waste management you can read in the presentation, prepared by Albin Keuc, for the project “No waste is good Waste”, which was initiated by Hungarian organisation Humusz, and was presented at an international conference on waste management, which took place 9 June 2005 in Budapest.  English presentation on WM.pdf  535.29 KB  29.07.2005 10:42 

In December 2004 we opened a first Fair Trade shop in Ljubljana, which is situated in the old town, Mestni trg 30. In the shop you can find many beautiful and practical articles from the developed countries. Welcome!

For more details on programmes and projects please consults the attached ten year report.  Umantera report 1994 -2004.pdf  573.84 KB  29.07.2005 10:43 

Since the official language in Slovenia is Slovene, most of the projects are in Slovene. Limited resources render us impossible to translate all of our work. We are therefore inviting you to contact us in case you have further information about our work.

Contact details:

Umanotera, The Slovenian Foundation for Sustainable Development
Postal address: P.O. box 4440, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Office address: Trubarjeva 50, Ljubljana, Slovenia
e-mail: info@umanotera.org

tel: 00 386 1 439 71 00
fax: 00 386 1 439 71 05