Meet the speakers

Adam is a Higher Education lead and a social innovator (INNOCAMP PL, Ashoka Fellow and Advisory Board) who co-founded and ran 5 NGOs, currently he is the President of International Sustainable Education Foundation in the Hague. He has worked as an expert on social inclusion such for institutions as European Parliament, UN, European Cultural Foundation in Amsterdam, Open Society Institute (Soros USA & Europe), M&B Gates Foundation, 92nd Street Y, and many national governments.

As a researcher and Higher Ed executive (Dean and Head of International Office at University of Gdansk) he has led numerous projects and residencies to establish changemakers’ campuses.

Country Representative at Ashoka Poland and Interim Director at Ashoka Nordic. Before working for Ashoka she has worked for PwC, co-leading the Sustainable Business Solutions Advisory Team.

She was part of the Child Malnutrition Working Group at Minister Michał Boni's team of advisors to the Polish government. She co-founded The Foundation for Social Communication in Poland and SMartKolektiv in Serbia – organizations helping NGOs to use the tools of marketing in order to support their social mission.

Anna is a philanthropy professional, sustainability promoter and a mother of three. She splits her working hours between the philanthropic Tiina and Antti Herlin Foundation and Security Trading

She has a generalist academic education with two master's degrees from the University of Helsinki, and an incurable tendency to digress. Anna's most recent pet project is Puistokatu 4 - a Space for Science and Hope.

Anne Philpott is a public health professional, pleasure propagandist and ‘guerrilla girl’ of HIV prevention. She founded ’The Pleasure Project’ in 2004, in frustration of endless AIDS meetings where no one talked about people’s motivations for having sex, or even pretended sexually transmitted infections were airborne. 

Anne has over 20 peer-reviewed articles in respected health journals and more in the mainstream media, and has been a speaker at international conferences, promoting pleasure in sex education and as the ultimate indicator of female empowerment. She has also published articles on nutrition and disease prevention services. 

Ari Evwaraye has strived to be a changemaker and impact evangelist in government and the field of human security. As Head of Strategy at the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, Ari has furthered initiatives related to equality, human rights, feelings of safety and social impact within the policy area of internal security.

Phenomenon- and human-centric approaches, as well as co-creation, foresight and systemic solutions, get him excited. In addition to his professional engagement, Ari has been active in a few NGOs aiming for a brighter future for people in vulnerable positions.

Åsa Skogström Feldt is leading IKEA Social Entrepreneurship BV. Åsa has been the global president and CEO of The Hunger Project in New York and the CEO of The Hunger Project Sweden. She has also established social entrepreneurship in the supply chain at IKEA of Sweden, being the head of marketing for Sony Ericsson in Germany, corporate communications director for Aspiro and marketing communications manager for Ericsson Mobile Communications in the Middle East and Africa.

Throughout her carrier, Åsa has focused on women empowerment, co-founding two women’s organisations.

Benjamin Pitkänen is a passionate vegan activist and one of the founding members of the Viral Vegans Animal Rights Association. Benjamin's work in front of animals has been covered in the big Finnish media outlets.

Benjamin runs Viral Vegans with his team, holds speeches at various events, and does social media activism. He wants to wake people up to think about how our consumption habits relate to animals' exploitation and killing.

Cristina Ljungberg is a Co-founder of The Case for Her, a philanthropic investment portfolio addressing the key women’s health issues of menstruation and women’s sexual health & pleasure. Before The Case for Her, Cristina established the foundation Giving Wings in 2010.

She is also an active board member for the global non-profit, Acumen, focused on poverty alleviation through impact investing and leadership development, as well as AFRIpads, a manufacturer of reusable cloth menstrual pads.

Dora Hietavirta is a professional who is always curious and thinks beyond the obvious or accepted. Her most recent interests are complex systems, regenerative systemic design, and urban development.

The lenses that Dora constantly sees the world through are learning and community development.

Eli Frankel is a Swedish process leader and curator. He has a background in performing arts as an actor, musician, curator and dramaturg with 20 years of work experience in theater institutions in Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

2022, Eli’s facilitating and designing the program SFV Changemaker together with Ashoka and SFV. 

He has created educations for process leaders and production of pedagogical resources for several changemaker programs in Sweden since 2010. The aim has been to help young people to identify and act as local changemakers and to solve a real challenge in their local municipality. The goal was to design a 3 weeks program and create modules that contained:

Rhetoric skills

Team Building skills

Norm-critics

Self-leadership

Awareness around impact strategies

For the past five years, Elisa Vepsäläinen has led the rapidly growing Startup Refugee, which supports people with refugee status in entrepreneurship and employment.

In her work, she has focused on promoting social responsibility and effectiveness, while also building relevant brands and bringing together different actors to address societal challenges.

Evita is Head of Strategic Partnerships and also leads on the Impact Academy at Katapult Foundation. Prior to Katapult, she was part of the Senior Management team at Big Society Capital, a leading UK social investment institution.

She has served on a number of Boards including the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, RCB plc and Bethnal Green Ventures.

Gunta Krumina is an innovative, professional business development consultant, as well as a systems change facilitator and advocate.

She designed and led systems thinking workshops and training together with team members from Systems Change Finland. One of her visions is to bring forward the best of systemic innovation for a better, sustainable, and inclusive world.

Professor Hannah Kuper is a Co-founder of the Missing Billion Initiative. She is also the co-director of the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

She is an epidemiologist by training, having attended Harvard University and Oxford University. The main focus of her work is on health and healthcare access of people with disabilities in low and middle-income countries.

Hanno Nevanlinna is one of the founders of Futurice. He has walked the path from a startup to an international company. Hanno is one of the masterminds of the Futurice culture as well as Lean Service Creation methodology. During 2004-2009, Hanno innovated, planned and built Finland’s largest photo sharing service Kuvaboxi. From 2008 to2010, he founded the Futurice UX consultant team and during years 2010-2013, Hanno led as head of HR Futurice to be the first company ever to be selected as Europe’s best workplace twice in a row.

Currently, Hanno talks and teaches companies how ways of working, culture and organizations are key in building a better future. Through his hobby project, Hanno is an internationally awarded furniture designer. With his work, Hanno goal has been to show that everything can be revisitted to create more value to the users, society and business.

Henrietta Moon is the CEO and co-founder of Carbo Culture. Henrietta is recognised as a World Economic Forum ‘Global Shaper’ and from 2016-2018 she was a board member of a publicly traded electronics company (Nasdaq omx Hel: YEINT). 

Her prior experience includes growing two organisations in edtech and founding Mehackit, a creative technology company. She’s an alumna of Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program held at NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford’s founder community StartX.

Stressless and abundant entrepreneurship. Jari is a serial entrepreneur seeking to support regenerative and socially transformative technology businesses to significant growth.

Kari has over 30 years pioneering academic, corporate and NGO experience of learning, innovation and business ecosystems. He has worked in and for multiple organisations advancing proactively boundary spanning creativity, collaborative innovation, digitally enabled services co-creation, social entrepreneurship and human-driven societal change.

He has acted e.g. as an executive producer, programme director, consultant, mentor, senior fellow and impact entrepreneur in the contexts of international RDI projects, digitally enabled services co-design, learning technology development, global living lab movement initiation and sustainable societal transformation among others. 

Katja Anoschkin is a Development Director and an Impact Specialist at ARVO – the Finnish Association of Social Enterprises.

She has been creating tools for impact modeling and measurement for impact companies and public sector organisations. At the moment, she also works as the administrative lead of the Centre of Expertise for Social Enterprises.

Liisa Smits has developed an accurate and reliable weather forecast system for the tropics. By making it accessible to smallholder farmers the service empowers them to make educated decisions to increase efficiency and agricultural yield. Upon graduation, she moved to the US to work on climate change research as part of a NASA research project.

While monitoring climates in different parts of the world, she discovered that the formula for calculating weather patterns and forecast for the tropics was extremely unreliable. Liisa then decided to use her skills and background to make a sustainable impact and founded Ignitia.

Iina Santamäki is a regenerative leader, systems thinker and bridge-builder with a vision to co-create a just and sustainable future for all.

Her latest degree, an M.Sc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability, combines systems thinking and complexity science, strategic leadership and sustainability science, and thus provided her with the skills and knowledge to facilitate and lead processes for systems change. Currently, Iina is an entrepreneur and a Specialist at The Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra.

Mari Tikkanen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Scope Impact. She is also the Co-Founder of Innovation Lead, Missing Billion. Mari leads the Scope by developing new ways of delivering social impact.

Prior to co-founding Scope in 2008, Mari worked for 15 years on women’s and children’s health and rights, including for WHO South-East Asia Region, UNFPA, IPPF, AMREF and Aurat Foundation in Pakistan. She has more than 25 years of experience in the field of development and health.

Maria Ahlström-Bondestam co-founded the Eva Ahlström Foundation in 2010 and have since continued the work for underprivileged women, and children that began in the late 19th century.

Maria Ahlström-Bondestam initiated, co-founded, and chaired the HAPPY and TOGETHER projects, working for a more equal and sustainable world. In 2020, Maria initiated a collaboration called Ahlström Collective Impact with the aim to make strategic investments with impact to support the realization of the United Nation’s SDGs together with UNICEF. In 2021, she was elected Chair of the UNICEF International Council.

Mark Cheng is the Founder and Managing Partner of Social Innovation Circle, a global coaching platform for social innovators. Mark is an impact investor who has raised and invested over $250M into social impact organizations around the world.

Since 2010, he has been the Senior Advisor on Social Finance at Ashoka, and has coached and mentored many social impact founders in how to create sustainable business models for social change. Mark is the author of the ‘Social Investment Toolkit’, a free online guide for impact entrepreneurs on how to raise finance for social innovation.

Together with Ashoka, Markus Freiburg has founded the Financing Agency for Social Entrepreneurship (FASE) in Germany. FASE helps leading social enterprises across Europe in raising hybrid growth capital so that they can scale their social impact. 

Markus is recognized as a thought leader for social finance in Germany and beyond. He has an active presence in public discourses and wrote a wealth of articles, reports and case studies on best practices in social finance. Prior to this, Markus worked for more than 7 years as consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Markus Raivio is a leading social entrepreneur who co-founded Kukunori in 2012 to design an entirely new way of working with mental health clients through culture. Through his organization, Kukunori, Markus is championing social welfare through an approach centered on promoting human and civil rights and functional peer support.

Kukunori ultimately aims to develop new and innovative solutions to challenges in the mental health and cultural sectors. In addition, Markus is taking the unique Guided Functional Peer Support model (GFP) that he developed to 43 organizations across the health sector in Finland. The GFP model puts people suffering from mental health issues in the driving seat of all interventions.

Mikko Dufva is Leading Foresight Specialist at Sitra (The Finnish Innovation Fund) and docent in future studies at Aalto University. In his work, he examines future trends, the tensions between these trends and mental images connected with the future. In addition, he seeks to identify signals that may be weak now but which nevertheless are significant for the future.

Mikko has extensive experience in foresight studies and he has a doctorate in Science (Technology) on creation of futures knowledge and systemic foresight.

Neslihan Dane is Vice-Chair of SKY (Suomen Kulttuurienvälinen Yhteisö), the Finnish Intercultural Community.

By profession, she is a Mathematics teacher with 11 years of experience teaching in Thailand, which also served her to widen her networks, meeting new people and learning their cultures. That was actually the reason why SKY attracted Neslihan as it aligns with her enthusiasm to support volunteering for multicultural initiatives.

Per Olsson is Associate Professor, Principal Researcher and Program Director at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. His current research focuses on systems entrepreneurship, innovations, and capacities for navigating transformations towards equitable and sustainable futures. In 2019, 2020 and 2021 he was recognized by the Web of Science as one of the world's most influential researchers of the past decade. He is dedicated to bringing cutting edge sustainability science together with the cutting edge practice.

This has lead him to design and facilitate programs for change-makers such as BALTICLEAD, Transforming Change, Catalyzing Change, The Rockefeller Global Fellowship on Social Innovation, and the SRC Executive Education Program. He also advises CEOs, entrepreneurs, and philanthropic organisations on sustainability transformations, and he enjoys creating innovative spaces that combine music, art, science.

As the co-founder of Ambitious Africa, Ronny is connecting, inspiring and empowering young people in all African and Nordic countries to work together, lead the change and create transformation.

Ronny is actively building ecosystems both locally and globally, focusing on fields such as entrepreneurship, education, entertainment, food and communities.

Salaado Qasim is an author, columnist, teacher and Co-founder of the Peace and Well-being organization RAHY (Rauhan ja Hyvinvoinnin järjestö ry) a non-governmental organization founded in 2019 that aims to improve the living conditions of women and young people by providing opportunities in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

The organization has been set up by university students with solid experience, especially young people and women.

Sara is an academic and social entrepreneur that is currently exploring how we can harness technology to innovate for next generations. She has a long background of working with multi stakeholder innovation processes for sustainable solutions in resource constrained settings, such as distributed energy, water and affordable housing mainly in East Africa.

Sara led the interdisciplinary research and innovation project New Global at Aalto University before founding the mission driven company Leapfrog Projects. Leapfrog applies design and systems thinking to guide value chain reorganizing and sustainable urban development.

Milja is a future expert of changing societies. She has been working with the Lennons, a group of young peace ambassadors founded by CMI (Crisis Management Initiative), since 2019.

The heart of the Lennons' activities is to convey a message and know-how of everyday crisis management from a young person to another young person - and that is also the absolute strength of the group. Milja has an academic background in political science and works in research and strategic consulting. Her future goal is to specialize in issues concerning the world that is changing at an accelerating pace and under new uncertainties.

Mårten Knuts is the Managing Partner of Krogerus, one of the leading law firms in Finland. He represents a wide range of clients in cross-border and domestic corporate transactions.

Mårten regularly advises boards in listed companies on corporate governance matters and assists in strategic disputes pertaining to complex regulatory matters.

Tom works as Programme Manager at ARVO ry the Finnish Association of Social Enterprises.

He is also responsible for the development and conceptualization of national counseling and guidance services at The Centre of Expertise for Social Enterprises.

Tomas Björkman is an author, social entrepreneur and the Founder of Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm.

He is also the Co-founder of the research institute Perspectiva in London, the Co-creation Loft, the media platform Emerge in Berlin, and the 29k.com personal development platform.

Zeynep Falay is an entrepreneur, transition designer and sustainability and system change advocate. She is the Founder of Designer Activists for Regenerative Futures Collective and an active board member of Systems Change Finland.