Photo: Stavros Petropoulos

Onassis Foundation

Culture, Education and Health. These are the things a human needs to truly live.

The Foundation’s first and last principle is human nature.

Onassis Culture

First among equals comes culture, understood not just as art but as a way of life. Onassis Culture, with the Onassis Stegi as its hub, with its theatrical and dance performances, its art exhibits, conversations, lectures, printed editions, and steady digital presence, begins the conversation about what’s happening, what should be happening, what we’d like to see happening in Athens, Beirut, the Balkans, New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires — in short, all over the world. And this journey outward does in fact take place, as dozens of performances that begin at the Onassis Stegi go on to tour all over the world — an example of an outward-looking procession of Greece at its very best — but more importantly, in non-material ways: through ideas, questioning, refutation.

The City

Art remains colorless if it stays trapped inside. Culture, as the Onassis Stegi understands it, gets out and travels through the city, goes down to the center of Athens and advocates for it as a diachronic, but also living place, a space for the fermentation, collision and exchange of ideas. Onassis AiR, a year-long program situated in the center of Athens, in which all participating residents can interact as equals, without the pressure of time, work and deadlines, represents the epitome of the Foundation’s philosophy: that the conditions for creation must be ensured. Time for ripening allows talent to break free and develop.

The local becomes global. And the global, local.

With respect for the past, yet intent on avoiding nostalgia or idealization, Onassis Culture sketches the future, seeks the energy and momentum in every corner and patch of light in the city, encourages talent and personal expression, introduces people to one another and is constantly looking for what sets them apart, what affects them, what has meaning, what will in the end change the city’s particular way of being. At the same time, it speaks up, disagrees, advocates, and takes a position regarding anything that stands in the way of freedom, democracy, life. From the center of Athens, the message travels. The local becomes global. And the global, local.

Onassis Education

Culture follows Education. Onassis Education supports the growth and development of the individual. Above all, it seeks out excellence, determination and the rare art of wanting to become the best in your field.

Since 1978, the Foundation has been offering fellowships to graduates of Higher Education and Technical Institutes, supporting schools, university chairs and programs of Hellenic Studies outside Greece, providing fellowships for doctoral research, promoting academic figures whose work has marked the current era through the Onassis Prizes, establishing the Onassis Science Lecture Series at FORTH, Crete and supporting the participation of Greek students in the international and highly-regarded scientific Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.

Education has meaning when it is addressed to all. This isn't simply a phrase, it’s an unambiguous political philosophy that involves long-term planning and a clear perspective. Each year, Onassis Education grows and develops its educational programs, which are addressed to a wide audience. It opens the doors of the Onassis Library in the historic neoclassical building on Amalias Avenue to present programs for children, families, adults and scholars, bringing them into contact with modern Greek history and the intellectual activity of the Greek people. Likewise, the Cavafy Archive, whose care and promotion the Onassis Foundation has undertaken, continues its educational activities in Athens and surrounding areas and creates guidelines for open access, through its digital repository, to the entirety of the digitized material, opening the door to new research and interdisciplinary collaborations around the world. This mosaic is completed by Special Education programs, such as “Music Loves Autism”, which brings the meaning of inclusivity into practice.

Onassis Health

Twenty-five years ago, the Onassis Foundation gifted the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center to the Greek public sector. Since then, the Center has seen 43,713 heart interventions, 1,698,900 visits and 137,062 hospital stays. The Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center was the first hospital accredited in Greece to develop and provide health services in the field of cardiac surgery and cardiology for adults and children. Onassis Health continues to believe in a deep political value of increasingly urgent relevance: free public health care for all. The Onassis National Transplant Center, the Foundation’s new donation that was announced in October, 2018, continues its work in Health Services and comprises a new initiative on a national scale that comes yet again, 25 years after the creation of the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center, to change the nation’s medical as well as social landscape. Fighting against solidified preconceptions, beliefs and social conservatism, the Onassis Foundation aims to comprise a catalyst for social change in everything regarding organ donation — for which Greece currently has the lowest rate in all of Europe.

Meanwhile, the activities continue. From rebuilding the Melanoma and Skin Cancer Center at the Andreas Syggros Hospital; to supporting of providers and organizations such as the Department of Pharmacology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, ELEPAP Rehabilitation for the Disabled, and the Elpida Association of Friends of Children with Cancer; to granting dozens of fellowships to medical and nursing staff; to numerous activities in the field of Special Education and programming for individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities, the Onassis Foundation’s work in Health has only a single, unwavering point of reference: the individual.

The individual

Above all, the Onassis Foundation is a heterogeneous human ecosystem. It is a gathering of personalities, moods, goals, and talents that allows for unexpected encounters between artists, doctors, business-people, academics, sailors, philosophers, technocrats and activists, resulting in the words that bring them together — words that are always more than they had expected.