Demain Foundation was established in 2008 to help Costa Rica address some of its challenges: providing high-quality education, promoting environmental sustainability, and fostering identity through culture.
As its name suggests ("demain" means "tomorrow" in French and "main" means "hand"), its mission is to build a better tomorrow hand in hand with the people.
It is precisely the people who bring this organization to life and around whom its projects are structured.
Our actions are developed with and for individuals: we work closely with environmentalists, students, teachers, artists, communities, and local authorities, among other key stakeholders.
We believe that education, the environment, and culture are essential pillars for transforming our realities. That is why we work hand in hand with students and teachers, park rangers and visitors, artists and their audiences.
Steven J. Aronson is an American citizen born in New York City, as part of a four-member family, with his parents and sister.
Graduated in Agricultural Economics, he began working at an early age, which allowed him to travel across Latin America during his youth. From his first visit to Costa Rica in the 1960s, he fell in love with the land, its culture, and its people. Thus, he adopted this small country as his home and decided, in 1976, to settle and support the Costa Rican people through his work in the agribusiness sector.
In 1985, he founded Café Britt, with an innovative vision of offering the same high-quality coffee that was exported, for domestic consumption. This allowed Costa Ricans to enjoy world-renowned coffee at home. The Café Britt brand gained recognition in many countries, opening stores worldwide.
Coffee and cocoa led him to connect with the tourism industry. Through his agency Saragundí and the Golden Bean Tour, he encouraged tourists to visit coffee plantations. In the 1990s, he created an innovative concept for coffee tourism with the Café Britt Coffee Tours, a theatrical experience where tourists learn about the coffee process from planting to the cup, featuring Costa Rican actors and actresses.
This initiative captured the attention of over a million visitors interested in learning about coffee, diversifying the use of the crop and educating consumers about it. The project recorded over 20,000 artistic performances, turning traditional activities (working in the coffee fields) into a tourist attraction.
Moreover, the coffee tours increased job opportunities for actors in the tourism industry and marked the beginning of the Asociación Cultural Teatro Espressivo (ACTE) a non-profit organization founded by Aronson to support high-quality artistic innovation and attract new audiences.
To strengthen the alliance with the sector, Aronson opened a café at Poás National Park at the beginning of the millennium, providing professional food services whose proceeds went to the park itself. This model was pioneering at the time, merging two of Costa Rica’s main attractions: nature and coffee tradition, enhancing visitors' experiences through tourism and conservation.
This project, combined with the awareness that a potential collapse of the national park system would lead to the downfall of the tourism industry, led Aronson to co-found Asociación ProParques in 2006, a non-profit organization uniting the tourism, conservation sectors, and friends of national parks for sustainability through ongoing park ranger training and improved visitor experiences.
His professional journey also includes his role as a professor. Passionate about education, he co-founded the Association of International Baccalaureate Schools in Costa Rica (ASOBITICO) in 2008 to bring the prestigious International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IB) to public schools across the country. With the goal of closing the gap between public and private education, these efforts are currently supported by the IB Compass Foundation, which, through community building, access, and guidance, aims to enable more schools and students to experience graduating from an internationally recognized program. With 16 years as a professor, he continues to strategically and financially support world-class educational projects.
By 2009, after stepping down from his active role at Café Britt and passing the company to his children, Don Steve dedicated his time to working for Costa Ricans, pursuing his three passions: education, environment and culture, with the vision of leaving a better world for future generations. This vision led to the creation of Demain Foundation an organization that integrates these three pillars to improve Latin America, where innovation has been a constant in every initiative.
Currently, Steve Aronson serves as a mentor at Café Britt Corporation and leads Demain Foundation which has been working for over a decade to build a better tomorrow hand in hand with the people.
This is the story of our founder and president, a visionary and innovative man who dreams of leaving the world a little better than he found it, alongside teachers, park rangers, and artists.
Café Britt is his work, but Fundación Demain is his legacy!