Skip to content
Philanthropy

Philanthropy

Where we put effort that is not an investment.

Why this project

Drawn portrait of Khanh Tran, smiling, in three-quarter view.
Khanh Tran (1974 – 2010)

Khanh, Minh's sister, has always inspired him. Born in Saigon, she left for France in 1975 during the war. After her studies in Le Havre, she started her career in Malaysia, where they lived together in Kuala Lumpur. Married back in France, she gave birth to two magnificent girls, and passed away a few hours after childbirth at the hospital, due to medical error from a lack of preventive care. In memory of Khanh, Minh created an endowment fund and launched the Fondation K Project in 2021, for innovations in preventive healthcare.

Acting on prevention

We believe in preventive care. We cannot cure every disease; but if we could foresee what is coming, we would pay closer attention to preventive measures as soon as symptoms appear. The Fondation K Project aims to solve complex medical problems with preventive, innovative solutions.

Our method

Source, Support, Scale, Score.

We source innovative projects from makers' labs around the world. We support them with donations, so they can scale through corporate partnerships. And throughout the relationship, we score their concrete impact on preventive healthcare.

The Fondation K Project logo: an orange Vietnamese conical hat whose tip traces a K.

Fonds K

The Fondation K Project is a blueprint for Fonds K's first steps, registered under French law as a fonds de dotation — an endowment fund. We intend to create a foundation in time, but the endowment structure gives us many advantages in this first phase: a simple, flexible form that raises money like a foundation with far fewer administrative formalities — it can be constituted rapidly, where a foundation can wait almost two years for authorisation. The founders are free to choose their mode of governance, and to optimise it for the fund's goals.

Why give

The endowment fund opens tax advantages unrivalled in Europe for a declarative structure — one that requires no authorisation. The fund itself is not subject to corporate tax.

  • Individuals receive a 66% tax deduction on the amount of their donation, within a limit of 20% of their taxable income.
  • Legal entities receive a 60% deduction, limited to 0.5% of their turnover.
  • Charitable bequests are exempt from transfer taxes.

The notion of general interest the fund must serve is expanding. Long seen as purely philanthropic, creating a fonds de dotation is now recognised for its entrepreneurial potential — a perfect fit for our intent: encouraging innovation in sectors that matter.

Our projects

Mobilisation of makers in the Covid-19 crisis

Our white paper traces how makers' labs organised themselves against the shortage of equipment.

Art4Med

Art meets open science and technology in health and medical research.

Unborn0X9

An exploration of the role of obstetric science in the increasingly technological experience of human reproduction.

The workshops, in pictures

The projects we back are built in maker labs — open prototypes, shared machines, small runs produced under pressure.

  • Protective face shields stacked and hand-assembled during the Covid-19 crisis.
  • Textiles cut and sewn at SimplonLab during the Covid-19 crisis, April 2020.
  • A home sewing workshop mobilised to produce protective equipment, April 2020.
  • A volunteer assembles protective equipment at the WoMa workshop during the Covid-19 crisis.

Photographs of the makers' mobilisation (2020): Quentin Chevrier.

Talk to Mandalore

Book a call Opens the booking service in a new tabContact us

Clicking loads a third-party service (Shopinzen), which sets analytics cookies. Nothing loads before that.