Almost six million people live in Denmark, where around 1,400 towns and cities, and more than four million buildings, provide the settings for our everyday lives. This is where we reside, work, go to school, enjoy our leisure time and live out our lives. And this is where Realdania can make a real difference.
We work in the cross-field between quality of life and the built environment – where architecture and the physical surroundings can make a positive difference to people’s wellbeing and everyday lives.
We know that architecture and physical surroundings can help to solve both major societal challenges and minor everyday problems – from global warming and loneliness to homelessness and the indoor climate. This is where Realdania wants to make a difference.
We’re building quality of life for the future. We build to support relationships and communities and to create quality of life in all of life’s forms and phases.
Three collective association goals
At Realdania, we have three overarching strategic goals for our collective efforts:
We collaborate – with others and within our association.
We are here for the current and future generations.
We promote new knowledge and innovation.
We wish to bring our collective resources into play in order to achieve our goals. This applies to our association work, the returns on our investment assets, our professional knowledge and our philanthropic activities. All of our activities are founded upon a long-term perspective – which means that we also engage in difficult issues where the solution is not immediately obvious.
Our philanthropic approach
Our philanthropic efforts focus on boosting quality of life and improving the physical settings for everyday life in Denmark, while at the same time helping to create innovative solutions to global problems. These might include initiatives that stem from major efforts on our part, or projects that have their origins in local engagement.
Collaboration and partnerships are central to Realdania’s way of performing philanthropic work. In our experience, this produces the best, most well-anchored and effective solutions. We believe in strength through diversity and inclusion in both the projects that we support and in our way of working.
Our philanthropic endowments thus include both financial support for small, local and enthusiast-driven projects, and for significant physical demonstration projects and major initiatives, such as efforts to improve life in a vulnerable residential area, or innovative solutions that can steer the construction industry in a more sustainable direction.
Common to the projects and initiatives we support is that they must contribute to one or more of Realdania’s three selected philanthropic agendas:
The power of place
The potential of architecture
The future of construction
There must also be a clear philanthropic task, and it must be a task that other actors in society, such as the market or the public sector, cannot solve – or can solve only inadequately.
Find out more about the three agendas on which Realdania will be focusing towards 2031: