Get to know
Bertha Foundation

Our philanthropy is political.
Our hospitality is radical.

Bertha Foundation exists to create space, opportunities and connections for social justice work that is often seen as radical or not measurable. We do this work through our Fellowship programs, Bertha Spaces, grant funding and activating our network.

Read our story

👁 Chevron Down

Bertha is a small family foundation run by a team based in Geneva, London and Cape Town. Founded in 2010 by Tony Tabatznik and his daughter, Lara, Bertha Foundation works towards a society in which activists build collective power, stories come from many different voices and the law is used as a tool for justice.

Tony’s political consciousness was borne out of witnessing the evils of apartheid in his home country of South Africa. Bearing witness in this way instilled in him a true desire to try to make the world a better place. When his second international pharmaceutical business was sold in 2010, Bertha Foundation was brought to life. Together with Lara, and soon to be followed by Laura Horwitz, Bertha’s vision was established: to change the world you need an activist, a storyteller and a lawyer.

The generic pharmaceutical business had taught Tony an important lesson about using the law as a tool to help the underdog win. He’d had many battles against giant drug companies to break their monopolies and make medicine affordable to people around the world. Tony and a single lawyer would often go up against huge legal teams that were backed by massive corporations. Yet the better argument often meant that Tony would win. He’d take this lesson forward when thinking about social justice.

In 2012, Bertha Foundation launched its first bespoke program: the Bertha Justice Fellowship. The idea was to train the next generation of radical lawyers to hold those in power to account, all in service of the world’s most marginalized communities. This was Bertha’s anchor Fellowship program and trained nearly 500 emerging lawyers. This program taught us many things about our approach to supporting Fellows and how to provide the best assistance we can. These learnings laid the groundwork for our current programs; the Bertha Challenge, Bertha Spaces, the Bertha Artivism Awards and the Bertha Accelerator.

We’ve learned that investing in programs run by our team allows us to help innovative - and often overlooked - work succeed. It allows us to leverage our team’s field and issue fluency, while fostering relationships, to carefully select the projects that have the greatest impact. We theorize that our role is to create and hold space for our grantees to do their work and we put that theory into practice within these Bertha programs.

👁 Image

Our philanthropy is political because
inequality is political.

Philanthropy takes place in a world shaped by deep structural inequality and which is often created and reinforced by the very people and systems that fund it. Too often philanthropy diverts attention from the political projects through which wealth is accumulated while communities are disempowered, disenfranchized and harmed. Philanthropy is often part of this design - sometimes intentionally, and sometimes unintentionally.
‍
Philanthropy frequently reinforces existing power rather than challenges it. We work deliberately against that trend. We interrogate whether our philanthropy reinforces systems of oppression through the lens of the political, particularly as it relates to those with power. So, we support those who actively challenge power, politics and profit. Our philanthropy is political because meaningful change requires political will. Politics and philanthropy must be linked in order to create transformation.

Our hospitality is radical because
connection is radical.

We want every person in our spaces to feel seen and heard. Politics does not happen without connection, and connection cannot happen without spaces that welcome people fully. Public gathering spaces are increasingly rare. Repressive governments know that the first step toward control is to stop people from gathering.
‍
So we have intentionally built these spaces to counter this. Bertha Spaces are places where people can gather, connect and hone their political understanding of the world. That’s why our hospitality is radical: we create a place you can return to, belong to and fight for.