Athletic Club Foundation combines sustainability with social inclusion

Athletic Club Foundation combines sustainability with social inclusion

Cooperation between different entities is one of the strategic pillars of the work carried out by Athletic Club Foundation. The objective is to promote initiatives and activities that facilitate synergies that cause beneficial effects for all participants and, at the same time, help build a better society.

On the occasion of the celebration of the end of the season of the Bakuva Project, aimed at minors at risk of social exclusion, the Athletic Club Foundation has organized one of those activities that allow social inclusion to be combined with sustainability, two of the strategic areas of Fundazioa. Thus, around twenty boys and girls from the Bakuva Association went on an excursion to Mount Urkiola and took advantage of the trip to collect seeds for the CO2 Compensation project. This project, developed together with the Lurgaia Foundation, offsets the carbon footprint caused each season by the Athletic Club teams travelling by means of planting native trees in selected areas of the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve.

Under the instructions and supervision of technicians from Lurgaia and Fundazioa, the children of Bakuva enjoyed an excursion to the mountains while learning to recognise the seeds of two native trees in the area: Sorbus aucuparia (rowan or mountain-ash) and Betula Celtiberian (birch tree). Later, the Lurgaia Foundation will use these seeds to reforest the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve.

Precisely, last April Fundazioa organized an activity framed in the same CO2 Compensation project in which Ernesto Valverde participated. Along with the current Athletic Club coach, users of the Bestalde Program part of Adsis Foundation (aimed at people deprived of liberty and former prisoners), of the Osakidetza RSMB Project (in which people with mental illnesses are looked after in a cross-cutting and integrated manner) and of the Sortarazi Project (a Claretian association that works for the social inclusion of people in a situation of exclusion or at risk of it in Bizkaia through the full development of their capacities) planted more than two hundred trees of seven different native species. Synergies for the common good.