Venture Village: Espoo to Kerala

The following comes from the online edition of The Hindu of January 16.

Shilpa Nair Anand wrote it.

Class VII and VIII students of Global Public School, Kochi, had a unique project during the academic session 2019-2020. They had to create a working model of waste management in the school.

Until then their knowledge was theoretical, derived from text books. But now they had to rethink how they saw waste, and understand waste — the kinds, segregation and disposal. They worked closely with janitorial staff, to understand how the system worked and came up with their suggestions.

Guiding them was GreenCity, a programme designed to encourage school children to understand waste management and sustainability. This is one of the few such hands-on programmes to be introduced in Kerala schools.

…

The programme was created by Finland-based start-up Venture Village, set up by two Malayalis — Anup Jinadevan and Unnikrishnan Sreedhara Kurup — who have been living there, in Helsinki and Espoo respectively, for the past 10 years. Based on feedback from schools in Kerala about areas that need focus, they worked with Finnish experts to create the programme. They were helped by Munich-based Malayali research scholar, Dr. Raisa Sheriff.

Jinadevan, a dentist, working in the Helsinki City Health Service, is doing doctoral research in Social Policy at Helsinki University and Kurup is an engineer/entrepreneur pursuing a Masters degree in Education Entrepreneurship at Oulu University.

This sounds extremely interesting. We will find out more.