Geneviève Guenard

“We are all heirs to Nelson Mandela”. It was with this sentence that Michaël Brandt, SIDI’s partner in South Africa, returned my condolences after his death. He was inviting me to make good on the commitment we were all making together – SIDI’s partners, CCFD-Terre Solidaire, the Congregations and all our shareholders – to build a fairer world based on solidarity. This sentence continues to haunt me today.

As a religious congregation, we have been involved with SIDI from the outset, as have many others. Little did we know how far this adventure would take us. We wanted to support a different kind of commitment to a world of solidarity through economic investment.

Since then, this commitment has continued to grow. Like most congregations, we’re shrinking in number. Our patrimony, built up by pooling our goods and salaries, has become greater than the needs we have for the life of our sisters. Our commitment to making available to partners in the South, through SIDI, the finances we could free up is for us a direct extension of our mission: “To help those who are forgotten, those who are excluded.”

Our involvement with SIDI in this chain of solidarity that runs from North to South and vice versa means building a world of solidarity, where everyone can find their place, by combating the economic exclusion that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer. It’s about building peace.

“We are all heirs to Nelson Mandela”.