In the South Tyrolean Alps, in a house on a hillside with a view, the young team of ProjectTogether from Berlin took a week in September 2018 to strengthen the cohesion among each other and to sharpen their unifying mission: "Everything is possible, if only you can dare". The recipe for success of the social enterprise is already in its name: Tackling challenges together. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals form the framework for all activities.
Foe instance, the pragmatic idealists, as they call themselves, have already supported over a thousand approaches to solving the climate crisis or eliminating educational injustice.
How? By bringing young companies and initiatives together with mentors from politics, business, foundations and organizations. Working together to achieve more - what the ProjectTogether actors live internally, they also carry to the outside world. In 2018, the European Commission recognized them as pioneers in the promotion of responsible entrepreneurship.
Particularly astonishing: The team succeeds again and again to get problem causers also in the boat. This is the case with the latest project, the Farm-Food-Climate Challenge, in which large farms and retail chains participate. ProjectTogether brings these players, who are jointly responsible for the release of huge amounts of CO2, together with regenerative organic farms and moderates the approach.
"Today, agriculture is responsible for 30 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide," explains Philipp von der Wippel (24), founder and co-managing director of ProjectTogether, "just as well, cultivated land has the potential to serve as a carbon sink. One goal of the challenge: that retail chains give preference to products from regional organic farmers in supermarkets.
Social change works when the elderly, who sit at the levers, and the young, who often get stuck in the small, work together to find solutions.
With the #WirVsVirus-Hackathon at the beginning of the Corona pandemic, ProjectTogether has already proven that its method works: "In cooperation with six organizations, we have started a participation process in which 28,000 citizens have developed concrete solutions to challenges of the Corona pandemic," says von der Wippel. "The result, for example, is a chatbot for unbureaucratic applications for short-time work benefits - the software solution is already up and running. And the summit leaders are convinced that climate change also requires more experimental citizen participation.
You can read more about the young team of ProjectTogether and the challenges they are facing to solve the big challenges of our time together with the economy, politics and society here.
We are pleased that ProjectTogether is our goal partner for SDG 17 - "Partnerships for the goals".
Photos: All photos in this article were taken by © Samuel Groesch during the team building trip in Tirol
