The ViSEnet Blog
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Together we can do it!
[katja.rinne-koski] - 24. Jan 2022, 10:57
Three years has passed by and now we are at the final stage of our project: project outputs are ready and it is time to close up.
The background of the ViSEnet-project is based on the experiences of developing community-based tourism which led us to think about the potential of rural communities to provide needed services by themselves. The overall framework for the project was built around social entrepreneurship which was still a rather unknown business model in Finland at that time. We are extremely thankful that the Finnish National Agency for Education saw the potential of the project and granted our partnership the funding for supporting the rural communities by creating learning material targeted especially to the rural areas. We would like to thank all the partners for your commitment for the project even though the COVID-19 did make us rethink some of the project actions. During the COVID-19 the project group proved to be very innovative and determined to find solutions where others were seeing problems. It has been a privilege to work with you all.
The greatest thanks of all are directed to the rural communities who have been involved in the project. Your expertise, participation and dedication have been invaluable, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you. It has been a privilege to get to know you, and we are hoping to meet you again, hopefully in face to face this time.
At this moment we have a brand-new national strategy to promote social enterprises in Finland that also acknowledges the community-based social enterprises usually located in the rural areas. We are proud to be able to contribute the development work of rural community-based social entrepreneurship from our part with the intellectual outputs created in the ViSEnet project.
University of Helsinki Ruralia Institute
Seinäjoki, Finland
Merja Lähdesmäki, Principal Investigator
Katja Rinne-Koski, Project Manager
Anne Matilainen, Project Expert
The background of the ViSEnet-project is based on the experiences of developing community-based tourism which led us to think about the potential of rural communities to provide needed services by themselves. The overall framework for the project was built around social entrepreneurship which was still a rather unknown business model in Finland at that time. We are extremely thankful that the Finnish National Agency for Education saw the potential of the project and granted our partnership the funding for supporting the rural communities by creating learning material targeted especially to the rural areas. We would like to thank all the partners for your commitment for the project even though the COVID-19 did make us rethink some of the project actions. During the COVID-19 the project group proved to be very innovative and determined to find solutions where others were seeing problems. It has been a privilege to work with you all.
The greatest thanks of all are directed to the rural communities who have been involved in the project. Your expertise, participation and dedication have been invaluable, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you. It has been a privilege to get to know you, and we are hoping to meet you again, hopefully in face to face this time.
At this moment we have a brand-new national strategy to promote social enterprises in Finland that also acknowledges the community-based social enterprises usually located in the rural areas. We are proud to be able to contribute the development work of rural community-based social entrepreneurship from our part with the intellectual outputs created in the ViSEnet project.
University of Helsinki Ruralia Institute
Seinäjoki, Finland
Merja Lähdesmäki, Principal Investigator
Katja Rinne-Koski, Project Manager
Anne Matilainen, Project Expert