A Decade of Making a Difference

The Plattner family’s philanthropy in Africa began long before the establishment of the Foundation. Hasso Plattner’s patronage of the University of Cape Town began with a 6 million Euro donation in 2003 for the Isisombululo program to support youth health and education in South Africa.​ In the same year, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University in California was founded to prepare a generation of innovators to tackle complex challenges. Referred to as the d.school, the institute brings together students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, law, the humanities, sciences, and education to develop innovative, human-centered solutions to real-world challenges. The creation of the Stanford d.school jump-started the world-wide movement of design thinking in higher education, sparking many new degree programs, institutes, and d-school-like entities in colleges and universities.

In 2005, Hasso and Sabine Plattner hosted the 46664 concert at Fancourt, to raise awareness of HIV/ AIDS and its plight on women and girls. Their contributions ensured that 100% of ticket revenue could be donated to the Nelson Mandela Foundation. 

Founded in 2007 in Potsdam, the HPI School of Design Thinking (d-school) is a leading academic institution that trains students and graduates in multidisciplinary, collaborative teamwork to develop innovative solutions for complex problems. Together with ten international educational institutes, the HPI d-school founded the Global Design Thinking Alliance, promoting exchange with design thinking schools around the world.

In 2008, Sabine Plattner African Charities (SPAC) was established, aiming to develop locally adapted resources that teachers can use in classrooms and outdoors, infused with nature conservation content.

“Through education and community involvement, our projects are not just preserving nature. They are supporting the next generation to act, from the classroom to the rainforest,” says Sabine Plattner, who initiated Sabine Plattner African Charities. 

Sabine Plattner has supported George Child & Family Welfare (GCFW) since 1999, and since 2009, the Foundation has joined her efforts through SPAC. Ten years later, it helped launch the Cluster Foster Care program. GCFW, based in George, South Africa, protects and supports vulnerable children and families with services like therapy, statutory care, parenting support, and life skills. It also runs a special program for school holidays. Key initiatives include Sabine's Haven (a safety home for 12 children), "Buddy" (a mobile service reaching 300 children weekly), and the Toy Library and Resource Centre, which serves 12 early childhood centers. With the Foundation's backing, GCFW expanded its foster care program, now housing 40 children in six cluster homes, offering long-term stability and support. In 2024 alone, 3,535 children have benefited from GCFW services.

Hasso Plattner’s desire to make a positive and meaningful impact on society led him to sign the Giving Pledge initiated by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, establishing the Hasso Plattner Foundation in 2015. He highlighted that Germany’s largely tuition-free education system played a pivotal role in his own success. “I want to give back to the society that made this possible,” said Prof. Plattner upon establishing the Hasso Plattner Foundation (HPF), focusing its philanthropic support on education. Over time, it expanded its reach, supporting transformative projects in science, environmental conservation, and art. Throughout, the Foundation has remained driven by a single, unifying goal: to make a positive, lasting contribution to society.

“We keep pushing forward with entrepreneurial mindset, step by step,” highlights Dr. Rouven Westphal, member of the HPF Executive Board. “At the Foundation, our currency is impact,” adds Dr. Stephanie Ullrich, member of the HPF Executive Board. 

The EduConservation program started in 2015 in Africa as one of the key initiatives by Sabine Plattner African Charities. 

Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika was established at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business in South Africa. A year later, the first cohort graduated from the Design Thinking program.

The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. is a non-profit organization established in 2016 and based in New York City. It publishes digital catalogue raisonné projects, archival material, and hosts related cultural programming, all available to the public online for free. The Institute demonstrates the critical importance and relevance of archival research and its impact on cultural heritage. It also galvanizes new avenues of scholarly exploration that pertain to its digital holdings. The WPI has published six catalogues raisonnés and made more than 130,000 archival items available online.

The Museum Barberini has been enriching Potsdam’s cultural offering since January 2017 and has already welcomed 2.5 million visitors since its opening. The museum presents two to three temporary exhibitions per year, featuring loans from major international museums and private collections. The exhibitions are often based on Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist masterpieces from the Hasso Plattner Collection, which have been on permanent loan to the Museum Barberini from the Hasso Plattner Foundation since September 2020. As of January 2025, the Hasso Plattner Collection comprises 115 masterpieces, 40 by Claude Monet alone, making it the largest collection in Europe outside Paris.

In addition to a comprehensive digital offering for all exhibitions, the Museum Barberini offers an extensive education program that makes art tangible for different target groups, including children, young people and adults, international guests and visitors with disabilities.

Initiated by Sabine Plattner out of the ambition to combine education and scientific research for a more sustainable approach to conservation, SPAC marked its 10th anniversary in 2018. Now as one of the Foundation’s charitable affiliates, SPAC focuses on the protection of nature through education and community engagement and comprises three programs: Early Childhood Development (ECD), EduConservation, and Conservation Research. Together, these projects contributed to the conservation of 1.3 million hectares of rainforest in the Odzala-Kokoua National Park, with the Forest Massif inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2023.​

In was the summer of 1998 when Prof. Hasso Plattner, then CEO of SAP, announced the founding of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering (HPI) in Potsdam. By the winter of 1999, the first 77 students began their studies. Over the years, the Hasso Plattner Foundation has supported the institute’s steady growth. In 2019, HPI expanded internationally, partnering with the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City to create a digital health research institute. Prof. Plattner’s vision for HPI was to offer a unique computer science education—one that has inspired countless graduates to shape the digital world. By its 20th anniversary (in 2018), HPI had grown to 1,000 alumni, 750 students, 25 professors, and 50 guest professors—and continued to expand.

In 2019, Sabine Plattner received the Medal de Chevalier from the President of the Republic of Congo and the Order of Merit from the President of Germany in acknowledgment of her contribution to the conservation in the Congo Basin.

Three years after its opening, the Museum Barberini began displaying Impressionism: The Hasso Plattner Collection as a permanent exhibition. This exceptional collection of 115 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces includes works by Monet, Renoir, and Signac, a unique holding of paintings by Caillebotte, Pissarro, and others –  unmatched in Germany. With this permanent exhibition, Museum Barberini has become a key hub for Impressionist landscape painting, solidifying Potsdam’s place as one of the world’s leading centers for this iconic art movement. 

From 2020 to 2021, the Hasso Plattner Institute and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute (HPI) began collaborating at the crossroads of art and technology. “Art history has much to offer computer scientists – specifically, a wealth of data,” explained the teams as they explored how machine learning could unlock insights from digitized art historical documents. Their joint efforts have led to several research papers, an HPI dissertation, and a joint webinar on the potential of AI to identify, caption, and describe digitized artwork. At the Foundation, we actively encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations that foster innovation at the intersection of diverse fields.

In collaboration with Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Data4Life developed the CovApp to support decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic. The app enabled users to complete an anonymous questionnaire from home, determining whether they should visit a Charité examination center or another care facility.

With integrated QR code functionality, the CovApp streamlined information sharing, reduced waiting times, and enhanced efficiency at testing sites, enabling more individuals to receive timely care. This innovative open source solution reflects Data4Life’s commitment to leveraging technology for better health outcomes and supporting healthcare systems in crisis for the benefit of patients and healthcare systems worldwide.

The gorilla research conducted in the Odzala-Kokoua National Park plays a vital role in global primate studies. Sabine Plattner African Charities focuses on empowering local communities to safeguard the value of their natural resources and take an active role in protecting both their families and the rainforest. The Republic of Congo is home to 13,000 square kilometers of pristine rainforest and one of the world’s largest populations of western lowland gorillas. At Ngaga, on the edge of the park, a research camp sits at the heart of Africa’s highest concentration of gorillas, allowing researchers to conduct long-term studies supported by technology and non-invasive methods.

In the aftermath of Ukraine’s invasion, the Hasso Plattner Foundation has supported more than 20 initiatives, both in Ukraine and Germany, with one-time donations and total commitments of almost two million Euros, to alleviate the consequences of the war. These initiatives have provided medical care, relief supplies, protection of cultural heritage in Ukraine, and accommodation and support for refugees, children and university students arriving in Germany.

Since 2016, the Foundation has supported youth education, science, and healthcare in South Africa through the Isisombululo project. When the project concluded, the Foundation launched Embark in Knowledge, a new initiative aimed at reaching ever more young people in Thembalethu, George. In 2023, Embark in Knowledge expanded its impact by taking over the Inckubeko Youth and Science Center, adding math and science fairs, interactive science exhibits, robotics, and coding to its program. The goal is to spark young people’s interest in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) fields and innovation. Today, Embark in Knowledge reaches over 5,000 learners each year, helping to empower the next generation of leaders. 

Among the UNESCO additions to its World Heritage Sites list in 2023 was Forest Massif of Odzala-Kokoua. The Foundation joined all who celebrated this recognition as an essential sign of the need to preserve this unique ecosystem. “It is one of the most important strongholds for forest elephants in Central Africa, and is recognized as the park with the richest primate diversity in the region,” writes UNESCO.

The Hasso Plattner Foundation is proud to support several initiatives that contribute to the protection and conservation of the Odzala-Kokoua National Park, among them the Leadership for Conservation Africa and Sabine Plattner African Charities, both active in the Congo Basin.

July 2023 marked new beginnings at HPI’s Digital Health Cluster.

The addition of outstanding expertise to the cluster as well as the inaugural lecture by Prof. Lothar H. Wieler, Speaker of the Digital Health Cluster at HPI and Co-Director of HPI·MS, captured the impetus of the cluster. Prof. Wieler’s research focus areas comprise data-driven digital applications for Global Public Health, disease prevention, and access to digital health, among others.

The team at HPI’s Digital Health Cluster in Potsdam works in close collaboration with its sister institute at Mount Sinai in New York City, with Data4Life (another Foundation-backed digital health nonprofit organization), and since 2024 with CHAMPS (a Gates Foundation-backed nonprofit working to prevent child mortality in Africa). 

One of the initiatives supported by the Foundation under the focus area Science & Education is the joint research program “Designing for Sustainability” between the Hasso Plattner Institute and the MIT Morningside Academy for Design. It enables researchers from both institutes to explore common interest areas that could be developed into joint projects on sustainable design, innovation, and digital technologies. All to address the critical challenges expressed in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The program counts ten active joint research projects, spanning health, urban studies, computing, and more.

Navigating.art, a nonprofit that helps protect and promote cultural heritage through the creation of digital tools, joined the Foundation’s philanthropic Art & Culture initiatives at the beginning of 2024. The organization collaborates closely with its users to create and share digital catalogues raisonnés and archives with a global audience. It also publishes educational material to support all art researchers developing digital initiatives. Within the Foundation’s ecosystem, it works in partnership with the Wildenstein Plattner Institute developing digital archives and catalogues raisonnés and the Museum Barberini’s digital platform “Networks of Impressionism,” to be published in late 2026.

With special guided tours, workshops and various digital resources, a two-day symposium, an afternoon for Impressionism at the French Embassy in Berlin and the publication "Impressionist Places. Revealed in Paintings and Photographs," the Museum Barberini celebrated the 150th anniversary of Impressionism in 2024. The Hasso Plattner Collection is one of the world's most important centers of Impressionist landscape painting. Monet's “Antibes Seen from the Salis Gardens,” one of four new acquisitions in the anniversary year, marked the 40th painting by the artist in the collection. 

In the same year, the “Women of the Impressionist Circle” series by Wildenstein Plattner Institute (WPI) honored the anniversary by shedding light on the women artists, writers, collectors, philanthropists, and advisors who shaped the international success of one of the most referential art movements in history. ⁠Thirty-one artists participated in what would be known as the inaugural Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The webinar series by WPI highlighted the women whose works were on display during that pivotal year, both at the first Impressionist exhibition and the official Salon.⁠

In 2024, the Foundation renewed its support for the partnership between the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering (HPI), and the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai (HPI·MS), with Data4Life as technical enablers. This unique collaboration unites clinicians and medical researchers from Mount Sinai, computer scientists from HPI, and developers from Data4Life. Together, they are using real-world data and artificial intelligence to impact on medical research, benefiting patients and clinicians around the world.

Also in 2024, the Foundation’s support enabled the kickoff of a new research collaboration between Stanford and Potsdam. The Hasso Plattner Institute and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence have joined forces to research human-centered AI systems. This 6-year program aims to explore how humans interact with intelligent systems and to positively contribute to the field of AI and human-computer interaction. The Foundation supports this new research collaboration and the exchange of PhD students between the two institutes. The research will be conducted in areas such as explainability of AI systems, design of social computing systems, AI-assisted manufacturing tools, AI-assisted human-to-human interactions, and design of privacy-compliant smart spaces.

In 2024, SPAC’s EduConservation program expanded its outreach by developing and deploying locally adapted school materials infused with conservation content across six African countries. Key achievements included training close to 3,000 teachers in Congo, Senegal, and Gabon on country-specific Teacher’s Toolkits, as well as testing a third toolkit in Namibia. These efforts have provided young learners with engaging, hands-on resources to explore and protect their environment through play.

In December 2024, DAS MINSK announced the reveal of the new project called “ZEITEN”, a dynamic platform for the history of the terrace restaurant “Minsk.” Despite their different functions, parallels can be drawn between the former restaurant and the present-day MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam. DAS MINSK remains a place of encounter, between people and with art. A focus of the institution is the encounter with art from the former GDR and contemporary art.

The project begins with an audio collage, for which the cultural journalist and documentary film director Sylvie Kürsten went on a journey through time together with contemporary witnesses of the old “Minsk”. A continuously evolving image gallery also shows the building at different times throughout its history. ZEITEN will continue to expand in various presentation formats. In addition to the voices of contemporary witnesses of the old “Minsk,” ZEITEN will also include artistic interventions that look at the history of the building.