The Gofore Impact Foundation held a seminar for its 2024 beneficiaries this spring, to catch up with projects and understand the impact of the chosen causes so far.
The Gofore Impact Foundation was founded in 2023 to promote ethical digitalisation in a more impactful way than Gofore can do with its customer work alone. The Foundation’s first call for projects was held in early 2024, and the eight chosen projects have had almost a year of experience of added funding to their causes.
Improving disabled people’s working life skills
The Northern Finnish Oulu region’s association for disabled support had foundation funding for a project that develops the digital working life skills of intellectually and developmentally disabled people. In the project pilot, the association worked closely with disabled people. There are over 30,000 intellectually or developmentally disabled people in Finland, out of which only some 5,000-6,000 have paying jobs, and some 3,000 more could be employed.
The interviews and workshops held with the disabled were meaningful, and the participants received much needed support, concrete information and personal guidance from them. There is at least one more workshop to come, and the association plans to also offer more time and personal support within this space. There is not enough support for this in the wellbeing service county of Oulu and hence, the foundation’s support enabled something that would not otherwise have taken place.
Putting AI to work in plain language and imagery
The Finnish association on intellectual and developmental disabilities was also supported for their work in trying to put AI to work in improving plain language and symbol imagery, to help disabled people use digital services better. The results so far are promising but not final. It seems AI is good at producing Finnish language in general and making summaries of various topics. However, it cannot at least yet be recommended for turning Finnish into plain language.
AI is also capable of producing supporting imagery but there are some challenges, as AI doesn’t understand all concepts, and some of the images it suggests are too complex and have too weak of a contrast. This subject, however, is still something to look into in more detail, as AI can also be trained to assist us better, and its possibilities are almost endless in so much more than helping disabled people.
AI supporting ethical evaluation of digital projects
This project, christened as NeksusAI and a collaboration between Cohumans and Goforean AI and design experts, has come the furthest in a year. Its goal was to find out how AI could help IT professionals in the ethical evaluation of customer projects, and to perhaps develop methods and/or tools to facilitate that. As a result, NeksusAI rolled out a helpful tool for IT professionals at the end of March. Their conclusion was that AI is not a 100% credible answering machine, but it can help in making information searching or decision making faster or more effective, enrichen ethical argumentation or moral imagination. In other words, decision making cannot be outsourced to AI but it can help.
Ethical digitalization for NGOs
Finnish Information Society Development Centre, TIEKE, is also on the path of ethical digitalization for Finnish non-government organisations. This project is still ongoing, with the target of a guide for NGOs for their ethical digital development. We’re looking forward to the webinars, checklist and workshop concept in this space.
An improved site for working life training
The Children and Youth Foundation’s cause is the working life trainee programme that all Finnish teens get to do every year. TET.fi is a website that helps connect young people with workplaces offering trainee periods, which helps all parties including teachers. The foundation’s support has helped improve the website’s impact and specifically data collection, to obtain valuable information on the thoughts young people have towards working life and its future.
Immigrant women’s network took a digital leap
The Neighborhood Mothers network needed clearer processes and an online hub for running the voluntary immigrant women’s network in Finland. With the foundation’s support, network coordinator Nicehearts created clear values, processes for coordinating all their events, streamlining their training and ultimately easier operations with a new website that functions as a hub for all things Neighborhood Mothers.
Locally led peace building developing
The Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission and digital developer Valoa are working on a tool for locally led peace building and specifically its reporting. This project is not quite final, but the foundation’s support has been essential, as the funding that Felm gets otherwise is needed for other operations. A digital solution for peace building and measuring is not yet available anywhere so we’re looking forward to the pilot concept that is being introduced sometime next fall. Felm’s work aims to promote human dignity and justice around the world. The Christian message of faith, hope and neighbourly love has been the cornerstone of their work for over 160 years.
New app helps regenerative farming
The foundation supported the Häme university of applied sciences HAMK’s project developing the Farmer App, a mobile application developed in collaboration with Gofore to support farmers in regenerative farming. Visual data on farming conditions is particularly valuable for the future, as it can be used in both research and broader knowledge sharing. The wider project was a collaboration between HAMK, the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Baltic Sea Action Group (BSAG.
The project received most of its funding from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. The project ran from August 2022 to December 2024 and focused on two key areas, developing competence in regenerative farming and advancing digitalisation in agriculture.