Team Members: Athanasios Christopoulos, Tatu Leppänen
City Sprouts aims to address the disconnect of modern city dwellers from their local community and food production. Their solution is community managed, expertly guided urban gardens with a focus on food production. The main difference to existing practices is the guidance of citizens through the entire process, making urban farming easy and accessible to everyone regardless of their previous experience or time availability.
Team Members: Julian Honkasalo
Counter Speech aims to lessen the shadowy veil cast by hateful rhetoric and misinformation. The team offers practical consulting and problem-solving services for organisations and individuals alike in order for them to recognise hate speech and misinformation with the help of research-based counter speech techniques.
Team Members: Claudia Scaringi, Soma Hargitai
84% of kids in Europe are learning English but current online solutions are not effective for preschoolers. Gagalingo is developing an online language learning platform for small children, offering personalised lessons with teachers and engaging gamified content. The best teachers, videos, educational games and learning materials: everything you need in just one place.
Team Members: Leyla Nasib, Dorothy Zablah
HappyFam is an emerging tech startup working towards a shared dream of a more peaceful world within this century. On a mission to empower families with children on their journey to joy and resilience, they are dedicated to providing engaging and holistic education that enhances familial bonds and personal skills. From Nonviolent Communication to Happiness Neural Rewiring, Gratitude, and Emotional Mastery,
Team Members: Henna Paasonen
Henna Paasonen offers healing and hope for tired people in working life who suffer from disorders in cognitive processes and emotion regulation. Their proposed solution is to offer books on well-being, culture welfare services with the help of virtual reality and exhibitions of meditation art. The company functions in the Orthodox Juliana Community in Heinola and uses medieval women's spirituality as a basic guiding principle. The company offers retreat, silence and a holistic approach to health.
Team Members: Tatu Hiltunen, Anna Leskinen
Due to stigma surrounding them, nearly all used and forgotten sex toys end up becoming waste. Currently, there are no marketplaces, that would be both socially and hygienically comfortable for selling used intimate products. Suula is building an anonymous second hand marketplace platform for used sex toys including a comprehensive sterilisation service, ensuring that products meet hygiene standards and safety.
Team Members: Veera Nordman
Nordman On Purpose is aiming to solve the problems in organisational culture that are causing low commitment, poor motivation and low efficacy, especially during times of change. They offer science-based knowledge and practices to form and cultivate personal and shared purpose within companies. This is done by one-on-one coaching sessions with leaders on how to lead from purpose and to a purpose, and by organisational training on how to form and cultivate a shared purpose and to build culture around it.
Team Members: Venla Hakunti, Anni Lyytikäinen, Ninja Fedy, Lotta Wilkman
Juniper is the "Airbnb for sustainable team building". They're developing a marketplace where companies can easily find and book diverse activities that strengthen teams and create positive social and environmental impact.
Team Members: Leonardo Custodio
Theory 4 Action has developed an academically researched, dialogue- based solution that translates social problems and cultural differences into strategic communication training for companies, non-governmental organisations, political groups and educational institutions to build constructive dialogue and collaboration with local and global partners, clients, constituents and communities.
Team Members: Christopher Salata, Sara La Fountain
Current studies show that, despite attempts to raise awareness, many of the world citizens are unaware of the true scale of some of the biggest issues facing our planet right now. If more of the global population were more aware and educated about the data and its relevancy to our lives on planet Earth, they could be a greater part of the restorative solution.
TWE is developing a fun and engaging docuseries to educate people through entertainment about some of the Earth's most critical issues and the important data about issues such as biodiversity loss. With the help of the docuseries, TWE aims to highlight some of the people leading the charge against these issues with their novel solutions in an effort to galvanise collective momentum and inspire people into hopeful and rejuvenating action.
Team Members: Camilla Haavisto, Ira Haavisto
Over six million passengers traverse the baltic sea between Finland and Sweden annually. The consumerist milieu of the cruise ship offers little stimulation for intellectually curious travelers. Where can passengers learn about the surrounding archipelago, island communities and local flora and wildlife? Currently, nowhere.
In the border zone between journalism and tourism information, Sea Stories aims to take sea voyages to the next level by providing geolocated and hyperlocal stories about the present marine environment for cruise ship and ferry passengers.
Team Members: Nicholas Nelson, Freja Kivikettu
The longing after someone no longer with us is one of the most painful feelings in the world. There are no real guidelines or all-encompassing pieces of advice regarding grieving, often leading to people feeling lost and alone in their mourning.
Good Grief ! is developing a safe space for handling and understanding death. It combines a café, bookstore and event space, complemented by a digital resource center to create community around death, loss and mourning - in all their forms. Including death and the procession of grief in an approachable and welcoming manner is a necessity to foster our communities' wellbeing.
Team Members: Evgeni Rudakov, Zoya Kukurdaeva
TargetEd enhances language learning with the help of personalisation. Their app integrates users' skills, interests and favourite content into the learning algorithm, ensuring a connected and engaging experience. Whether users want to watch "Harry Potter" or read a biology book, TargetEd allows them to use it as an opportunity to improve their language skills. They are planning to launch MVPs in English, Russian and Finnish within six months.
Team Members: Elisa Falck, Annika Sarvela, Anne Karkkunen
Loneliness, division and societal polarisation are now at a level where they are threatening modern democracies. Without social interaction, fundamental relational needs are going unmet.
CAMPFIRE aims to repair these broken connections between people and groups of people by increasing trauma awareness within communities. The team is building an operating model to strengthen democratic dialogue and create societal change. Dialogue-, nature- and community art-based interventions are used to improve community mental health and wellbeing.
Team Members: Jean Gonzalez, Noémie Lemieux
Despite ample access to sports facilities, 55% of Helsinki city staff are overweight and 90% of Finnish youth does not exercise enough. Studies indicate that social isolation, rather than loneliness, drives motivation issues and even depression and even self-harm, still noteworthy issues in Finnish society.
Uniquely holistic and research-based, ‘Activate!’ tackles root causes of sedentary lifestyles to break vicious cycles of inactivity, fostering lasting positive changes by realistically encouraging social engagement, designing adaptive exercise support, promoting positive social interactions and mental health support, and fostering supportive networks for sustained well-being.