Jan Böhmermann took on the Hamburg company Viva con Agua in his satirical program “ZDF Magazine Royal”. “We millennials no longer want to rule the world with our German water, we just want to save it for a short time. Viva con Agua is practically ‘Doctors Without Borders’ to drink,” he joked. Viva con Agua, “that can only be a good thing”. Then Böhmermann followed up with his criticism and instead of describing the company as only apparently good: “Okay, the people who fill the bottles with the water for Viva con Agua at the company ‘Husumer Mineralbrunnen’, neither according to tariff getting paid and having a works council, that’s water under the bridge. Being a non-profit isn’t that easy.”
Böhmermann also wanted to take a closer look at the Viva con Agua companies, for example “Villa Viva Gasthaus GmbH
Mr. Adrion, why is Viva con Agua founding a new GmbH for each new business area?
The majority of all Viva con Agua organizations are non-profit associations or “gGmbHs”. Wasser GmbH, which sells the mineral water, and “Villa Viva” in Hamburg are the only normal GmbHs. That’s because they’re simply economical businesses. What is important, however, is that the majority of these GmbHs are owned by non-profit Viva con Agua organisations, which means that the majority of the profits go to non-profit organizations.
Is the structure so complicated to obfuscate something?
no In bureaucratic Germany we are building a framework with which we can implement the visions we have. We are transparent about profits and ownership. I don’t think it’s fair to make a disreputable tidbit out of a complicated network. We never said we wanted to abolish capitalism. We just want to build the most social construct possible from the circumstances as they are and use the system in the best possible way for non-profit purposes.
The two suites in your Hamburg hotel should cost 299 euros per night. Does that fit with an open, non-profit organization?
There are two suites in over 100 rooms. There are overnight accommodations on the camping floor for 19.10 euros per night. From there to the suites, there are options for all different people and budgets. The question for me is: Where else do people go to their hotels? Is it really better if they stay somewhere else, we are not involved and there is no social added value at all? In addition, we have created a house that can forever belong to the majority of the non-profit. It has been withdrawn from the speculative market and will hopefully still generate money for water projects in 300 years.
If the house should belong to the non-profit organization, why are private investors involved in “Villa Viva”?
The investors raised the entire equity of exactly 5.5 million euros that we needed for the construction loan from the environmental bank. Viva con Agua alone could not have done it. At the same time, the investors together only own 33 percent of the shares in the house. They have also committed not to sell their stake for 18 years, which is basically a really bad deal for them: they invest 100 percent, only get 33 percent of the shares and are not even allowed to sell them at a profit. It’s very rare to find something like this.
Do all profits from the hotel flow into Viva con Agua’s social projects?
No, not all, but about half. We have no idea about hotel business and have brought “Heimathafen Hotels” as a partner. They run the inn with us and get 40 percent of the profits. Most of the remaining 60 percent goes to Viva con Agua, and the investors are slowly getting their money back. In addition, the Viva con Agua Foundation earns something from the fact that the inn can be called “Villa Viva”. In this respect, one can assume that about half of the profits from the hotel business go to non-profit organizations.
Jan Böhmermann has criticized you for your cooperation with the Husumer Mineralbrunnen. Why do you work with this source when there is no works council there and the employees are not paid according to collective agreements?
Over 50 percent of all German companies with up to 200 employees do not have a works council. That alone isn’t a scandal. The Husumer Mineralbrunnen told us that the employees had not made any efforts to set up a works council, but that the management did not want to prevent this. There is no collective agreement for mineral springs in Schleswig-Holstein. That’s why the company is based on the collective agreement for mineral springs in Lower Saxony, which we have in writing. However, talks are already underway to check whether an in-house wage agreement for the Husumer Mineralbrunnen can be concluded.
Selling water is only a small part of your sales, while promoting drinking more tap water. Why don’t you just go out of business?
Maybe we’ll do that sometime in the future. Water has always been our liquid flyer, it drew people’s attention to us and that helped us a lot. But here, too, I think: If we no longer sell water, there will be no mineral water bottles that refer to the issue. Will the market be better if our market share is also taken over by large companies? I do not think so.
Mineral water, a cultural festival and now a hotel: Viva con Agua has grown significantly in recent years. Do you have to sell your own ideals on the way from a small non-profit organization to a large social network?
No, you don’t have to sell yourself. Of course we cooperate with companies and make compromises. But we always decide anew whether we can reconcile things with ourselves and our values. In recent years we have rejected donations of more than one million euros because they were based on cooperations that we did not want to enter into. We don’t want to strive for a utopia and fail, we want to improve reality. There is a deposit system at concerts, we donate the proceeds. There is mineral water, we try to use it to advertise tap water and use the profits for social projects. There are hotels, we’re trying to build one that generates profits for the non-profit. Nobody said that Viva con Agua is perfect. But: We take the status quo and improve it as best we can.
Tim Jonas Morgenstern spoke to Benjamin Adrion. The interview first appeared on Stern.de
