Members: Bahez Karim, Meryem Capkan, Sourav Shamwani
For many people living in cities, owning a car isn’t a part of their reality. People get around on foot, on bikes, and using public transportation. But what about when you need to travel long-distance between cities and smaller communities? For some, the answer is to rent a car, or take a train or long-distance bus. But renting a car is expensive and ecologically unsound, and public transport, when available, lacks the convenience and flexibility of cars and can still be on the expensive side.
For KeyTech, the answer lies in carpooling. A dedicated group of users in Finland already use carpooling as a way to get around, but current ways of arranging rides, Facebook and WhatsApp groups primarily, still add unnecessary difficulty to the process, thus limiting the broader adoption of carpooling. KeyTech wants to provide a mobile app-based service to help those interested in carpooling make it easier to find and offer rides, making long-distance travel easier, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly.
Members: Nima Ahmed, Nimo Omar Sheikh Musse, Faisa Ahmed
Caring for young people with disabilities and/or special needs can be a challenging experience for parents and loved ones. As family members of young people with disabilities themselves, the JINA team has noticed the difficulties migrant parents can face in receiving information about services for their child with disabilities. Often, due to language barriers, parents face difficulties in having theirs and their children’s needs met in schools, social services, and other institutions. And while there are many organisations assisting people with disabilities or migrants, there are currently none which exist at the intersection of migrant parenthood and disability.
JINA aims to solve this issue by creating a space where migrant parents who face cultural and language barriers can advocate for themselves and their families in their native language. The foundation would work alongside native speakers who are knowledgeable about existing services and can help families communicate with those institutions, while also aiming to provide a social space for both parents and children.
Members: Medha Gupta, Nidal Karagic
Urban lives today are often hectic and solitary, which often leads to people turning to pets for company. However, pets often require a lot more energy and time to tend to than owners are able to provide as solo pet-parents, especially those who are new to the experience, leading to a high rate of pets being abandoned or given up for re-adoption by overwhelmed owners.
Pawple aims to solve this by creating a community platform for pet owners to connect with and provide support to each other. With events, meetups, a shared pool of useful resources to help properly care for your furry friend, and a map with information on pet-friendly places, Pawple hopes to give pets and owners all that they need to have an easier and happier life together.
Members: Boniphace Kanyathare, Linda Dinda
Learning about STEM can be great fun for kids, but oftentimes when learning new concepts, just hearing about them without any practical demonstration can make it difficult for younger students in primary and lower secondary schools to fully grasp what they’re being taught.
Team Ujuzi Solutions' answer is to develop equipment and animations that would facilitate the childrens’ learning. After viewing simple and fun animations explaining the concept at hand and its real-world applications, children would get to experiment themselves with the equipment, which would use simple electronics and photonics like lenses and lasers, to understand and internalise the new concepts through practical yet fun activities.
Members: Dana Graydi, Naina Khatkhedkar, Emine Turkoglu
Dialogue4Peace is a non-profit association aiming to shatter prejudices and help prevent gender- and faith-based discrimination and hate speech through interfaith and intercultural encounters between people of different backgrounds. Their hope is that by providing opportunities for face-to-face dialogue as well as panels where speakers share personal views and experiences with each other and the audience, they can bring people closer to each other and help them better understand each other.
Their goals are to empower women, promote diversity and inclusion, help with integration, build bridges and relations between communities, increase cultural & gender sensitivity by amplifying the voices of women, immigrants, and refugees.
Members: Xiangchun Zheng, Maria Biletskaya, Aino Haapala-Samuel, Cynthia Hickey
The team at Edutainment Helsinki sees a problem: while we now have more time for leisure available to us than ever before thanks to more humane working hours and our longer lifespans, the way we spend that time isn’t conducive to our development as people or a healthier society. We are increasingly isolated in our online communities and activities, with less contact with others or ability to engage with those outside of our bubbles. And when we do leave these online spaces, the available offerings gravitate around consuming and sports rather than self-development.
Edutainment Helsinki wants to provide an alternative: a community and space for engaging edutainment events for people of all ages and backgrounds to meet with others, find both new friends and people with different views with whom they can exchange ideas and engage constructively, and attend interesting events where they can learn new skills and knowledge and have a place to work on that development.
Member: Bijan Rezai Jahromi
Most organisations are bound to conduct some form of international activity sooner or later. However, leaving one’s home market is an activity that is inherently loaded with risk, even if those in the organisation do not realise it themselves. But even for those who understand that there is some due diligence to be made, doing so can be difficult.
Meaningful hopes to help with that. By leveraging vast networks of contacts and an extensive knowledge in economic, security, and political affairs in a number of regions, Meaningful can provide country-based risk management estimates and support to ensure that any international operations are conducted in a way that is aware of and equipped to deal with any and all potential challenges.
Member: Tatiana Pertseva
AUROBOREA seeks to address the challenges faced by multicultural individuals who often struggle with bullying and discrimination in schools, universities, workplaces, and social media. The goal is to build a multilingual database with information and resources to combat bullying and discrimination as well as an online forum where people can provide peer-support to those struggling with those issues. In addition, the hope is to build an app providing personalised support and guidance as well as a system to report and track incidents, which can help identify trends and inform prevention efforts.
The idea also aims at creating a sense of belonging and social support for multicultural individuals and empowering them to consider themselves as change drivers able to construct a better environment for themselves and others. By achieving these goals, AUROBOREA can help address the issues of discrimination and bullying based on all forms of exclusion that these individuals endure while promoting mental health, quality of life, and well-being.
Members: Satu Perjo, Hanna Myllyniemi, Mila Roivas
Co-Consulting wants to help workplaces become more diverse, equal, and inclusive. As it stands, gender equality, minority positions and power dynamics must be considered inside organisations, yet organisations are not allowed to ask for the kinds of private information needed for creating change.
The team seeks to address this issue by providing companies with a B2B solution where they conduct DEI questionnaires, provide employers with reports & data and help them create action plans with workshops, education, communication to make sure that companies achieve the goals they set out in their diversity & equity plans.
Member: Luciana Faria Pereira Paltila
As globalisation, migration, and multicultural families become ever more common, parents are often faced with the challenge of raising their children multilingually. How can you ensure that your child speaks not only all of the family’s languages, but also other important international and local ones too? For many, finding resources that support and motivate their children’s multilanguage development can be challenging, and bringing books and toys from abroad can be expensive and nigh-on impossible.
The Minikie Factory, using Luciana’s experience as a teacher and mother trying to teach languages to her daughter and students, wants to provide multilingual and playful experiences to children in Finland by designing and selling sustainably produced multilingual toys, games, books, accessories and other items to help foster multilingual growth through fun while also supporting the children’s overall development.
Members: Benoît Schneider, Alarik Sutter
Project SKILLZ wants to develop a tool for career progression management allowing for clear career development paths and allowing people to be given opportunities for based on merit. The team envisages a visual representation of data based on employees’ measured skills and capabilities, such as proficiency in a language, coding abilities, and so on.
This way, employers could eliminate bias from their decision making when hiring and providing new opportunities, and help set clear development goals for employees that both parties can track. The increased transparency in career progression would help workplaces be more empowering for the people working there who would be more aware of how to equip themselves for their own career, and help companies facilitate their employees’ growth and promote the right people for the right roles.
Members: Natalia Stalchenko, Alona Hapey, Anton Stalchenko
WWA seeks to create a pre-school that provides a warm and welcoming environment where Ukrainian families displaced by the ongoing conflict can feel comfortable and supported as they navigate their new surroundings. By offering this space where both the whole family can learn and grow while maintaining a connection with their roots, WWA aims to promote the successful integration of these families into their new communities.
The team plans to recruit qualified teachers to use Finnish early childhood education models to support the children, while also placing a heavy focus on parent and family involvement in their educational approach. The pre-school will also feature multilanguage learning to help the children grow to their full potential, and eventually seeks to broaden their offering to families of all backgrounds who are seeking for a safe, playful, and inclusive multicultural atmosphere where all can learn, grow, and thrive.
Member: Markku Porvari
STEM education in its current form in Finnish schools doesn’t emphasize practice enough, frontloading students with plenty of theory, but not giving students the chance to learn by doing. The result is a bunch of confused students who, when they enter working life, have plenty of theoretical knowledge but little understanding of how to apply those in practice.
STEMverse seeks to create a mostly digital education platform that provides students with video lessons before moving on to hands-on exercises and projects, with teachers helping answer questions and facilitating the students’ practical tasks. Learning by doing, making, and accomplishing is how STEMverse sees students truly learn and internalise new skills and concepts.
Member: Kazimuddin Ahmed
Participatory Visual Methods, or PVM, is a methodology utilising collaborative processes to help conduct research which has a lot of potential in supporting research activities across the world. However, outside of the Global North, access to trainers and resources to conduct research utilising this methodology is limited, and deploying trainers from the Global North either requires stable, rapid, unlimited internet access which is unavailable to many, or the flying in of these trainers which is a wholly unsustainable endeavour.
The answer is to develop a comprehensive digital tool such as a mobile application which could be used offline and would include all the required resources for a PVM project. This would allow for the propagation of the methodology with greater ease as trainers could assist through less data-intensive methods like WhatsApp, and reduce the dependence on external funding for projects using PVM as the spread and training of the method could be done with the help of the app. In the end, the app would help researchers and communities across the world conduct activities that brings more people in to the process and produce results of greater quality.
Member: Grace Ferreira
The project aims to shine a light on the ways in which people with autism perform better in social interactions than non-autistic people, as well as explore the differences in which autism manifests in girls. By increasing broader understanding of these things, the project hopes to improve the ways in which people with autism are treated by broader society.