How the foundation became what it is today
Hans Hermann Voss was an engineer and entrepreneur by passion. The fate of the company, which he took over from his father as a small business and which he, with brilliant inventions and outstanding entrepreneurial spirit, turned into a successful enterprise, was very close to his heart. In order to secure the future of the company and to ensure a smooth succession, Hans Hermann Voss early on considered the idea of a foundation to become his successor. His marriage to his wife Christa had remained childless. Among others, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Zeppelin-Foundation served as models for him. In 1992, Hans Hermann Voss finally decided to set up his own foundation, and just before Christmas the time had come: the Hans Hermann Voss-Stiftung based in Wipperfürth was approved by the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Land of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Hans Hermann Voss regarded the first years of the still "small" foundation as a practice phase for the future in which the Hans Hermann Voss-Stiftung would receive his assets after his death as heiress.
From 2000 onwards, he again dealt fundamentally with the structures of his foundation and its objectives. He revised the foundation's statutes and, alongside the foundation executive, appointed a board of trustees as a supervisory board and as a second body of the foundation. He also stipulated that the chair of the foundation's board of trustees must always be the same person as the chair of the company's advisory board. Furthermore, he adjusted the foundation’s objectives.
At the time of his death in 2006, everything was well arranged: The Hans Hermann Voss-Stiftung became his heiress and was able to continue its funding activities in his spirit, as he and his wife Christa had planned long before.
A new phase began for the now "large" foundation, which was endowed with more foundation capital through the inheritance. The administration of the foundation had to be readjusted. The board of trustees laid down funding guidelines how the foundation's objectives and work were to be put into concrete terms in the spirit of Hans Hermann Voss. The foundation executive began to establish new co-operations in order to develop the funding activities equally in all the foundation's objectives. Still today, the foundation provides funding with a strong local and regional focus, yet sometimes also beyond the region.