Foundations play an important role in enabling and guiding action towards a more sustainable and ethical future. The increasing complexity of the challenges we are facing and the need to work towards systemic change has motivated us to convene actors from the field that are interested in exploring this topic further. Our intention is to co-create a series of stakeholder dialogues with the aim to ideate and prototype novel modes of collaboration and funding to enable and enhance social innovation and systemic change at scale.

The gender and inclusion working group started their exploration with researching the effects the COVID-19 crisis had on gender relations, especially on women.

Our systems and societal structures are based on stories, narratives, paradigms, even though most of the time we are not aware of it.

Citizens-led solutions to empower democratic decision-making for complex problem solving

As a society, we need to tackle the climate and ecological crisis. The “Democracy in transformation” working group of Nova Helvetia aims to find out how we can solve these complex problems that require political efficiency by implementing alternative forms of a society-led democracy.

The COVID-19 crisis offered an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on how we live together in the city: our dependencies, relationships, blind spots and processes, as well as our stories and mental models that hold our society together.

COVID-19 has delivered a stark lesson about the global interconnectedness of the health of humans, animals and our planet, known as the One Health concept. In the times of a drastically warming climate, the decisions that are taken during the next 18 months will fundamentally define the health of all future living beings.

An explorative journey to a healthy post COVID-19 Switzerland - With the Corona crisis, we are facing an unprecedented disruption. Systems we relied on before are on the brink of collapse and immediate actions were needed on multiple levels.