Last Autumn, Harri and I were walking around Vallila, where Harri has some office space. The area inspired a conversation, where we came to an exciting conclusion. What is really needed in Helsinki is a place where to work, relax, invite guests and have fun. And, doing good things should be an essential part of it. We thought, perhaps naively, that people had had enough of slaving away to pay the mortgage. It had to be possible, we thought, to get by and still make sure that others get by too. We had lots of names for this ideology, ’Reilun Työn Fellowship’ was one, ’Venture Philanthropy for all’ was another.
Few months later, in January this year, I was taking some guests around London looking at different social enterprises and The Hub in Kings Cross was one of them. Guests and I were equally blown away. The place and the community was simply amazing. Few hours later I was on the phone to Harri and said that we had found what we were looking for.
We started emailing Jonathan Robinson, one of the founders of the global Hub community. Jonathan provided us with lots of background materials, business plans, presentations etc. And we studied. Harri visited the Hub in Berlin, we searched the web, read the forums. At the same time The Finnish Institute published the study on social entrepreneurship in the SME sector in Finland. The result confirmed that social entrepreneurship was bubbling under our Nordic Welfare state. Jonathan asked how he could help – and we invited him over to Helsinki.
