Memmingen - The Zorn Family Foundation has distributed around 1.2 million euros to people with disabilities in need since it was founded in 2001. “Our thanks go to the foundation board for the great support of numerous institutions in Memmingen and in the Allgäu. And our thoughts today go especially to the foundation's founder Christa Schneider, who died in 2018. We are grateful and proud that the foundation was established two decades ago in the Memmingen town hall, ”emphasized Mayor Manfred Schilder at a ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of the foundation in the town hall.
Klaus-Dieter Walther, chairman of the foundation's board of directors, remembered the founder Christa Schneider, née Zorn, in his greeting. Her family came from the former GDR and moved to the West in the 1950s. Twist production Fritz Zorn KG was founded in Leutkirch. In the 1990s the family sold the company. Christa Schneider lived in Essen, founded the Zorn Family Foundation in Memmingen in 2001 and moved to the Diakonie in the Rheineckhaus in Memmingen in 2014, where she lived until her death in 2018. Christa Schneider gave her private fortune to the Zorn Family Foundation, which she also made the sole heir. Since the death of the founder, the city of Memmingen has appointed the foundation board, which always includes two family members and one other representative of the city of Memmingen.Currently these are the brothers Klaus-Dieter Walther and Bernd Walther from Leutkirch, whose mother was a cousin of the founder, and Jörg Haldenmayr, head of the youth and social affairs department.
The foundation supports a number of disabled facilities, special needs schools, church facilities and the children's hospice in Bad Grönenbach. Around 500,000 euros have been donated to the children's hospice over the years, explained Marlies Breher, CEO of the South German Children's Hospice Foundation, who expressed the thanks of all recipients of the donations. "We would like to thank the board of the Zorn Family Foundation for 20 years of beneficial, valuable help for people in our region who are not on the sunny side of life," emphasized Marlies Breher.
Representatives of institutions supported by the Family Zorn Foundation also took part in the ceremony in the town hall, together with the foundation board.
This year, in the anniversary year, the foundation distributed 100,000 euros, about half of which went to institutions in Memmingen.
In Memmingen, for example, the department store of the Diakonisches Werk and the lunch table of the Protestant Reconciliation Church have received donations in recent years.
(MK)
