Patrick Hiebert

Patrick Hiebert is the chief executive and chairman of Autris Group, the Panama City holding company quoted over the counter as AUTR, and co-founder and chief executive of its Veritas Villages arm, companies focused on freedom and self-sustainability in community development, and has been designing eco-friendly, self-sustainable communities for two decades. After founding and selling several high-tech software companies, he and his son Spencer lived aboard a boat and sailed the ocean, honing their skills in self-reliant living (generating their own power and fresh water) before applying what they learned to building new communities on land.

The practice came before the theory. After founding and selling several software companies he and his son Spencer lived aboard a boat, generating their own power and desalinating their own water, and he took what he learned there ashore to Central America, wanting a warmer climate, a lighter tax burden than Canada’s and neighbours who thought as he did. He set out the standard his projects are built to as an acronym, F.I.R.S.T.: freedom, independence, resilience, sustainability and transparency. In practice that means a community generating its own power and water, holding clear title, and publishing what it is doing rather than asking residents to trust a brochure.

Veritas Villages now has communities designed or under way across Central America, among them Playa Pacifica in Nicaragua, Coronado and Chiriquí in Panama, and Atenas in Costa Rica. More than a decade ago Hiebert, who is Canadian, founded Help Them Help Themselves, a charitable foundation built on the principle of a hand up rather than a handout, which has funded schools, clinics and sea turtle sanctuaries.