Make
peace
visible
Gutsy Go––the recipient of Finland’s highest innovation prize––is a method that combines key elements of pedagogy, media strategy, and peacebuilding.
Gutsy Go City Interventions shake up the school week by presenting a challenge to the entire age class of 14 year-olds. In collaboration with teachers, legal officials, and community leaders students design and implement unique solutions to promote solidarity and “social peace,” thus preventing polarization and tensions within their own communities.
Bold Ideas
Organized into task forces, students identify critical problems facing their communities and come up with dozens of dynamic solutions.
Immediate Action
Students provoke support from local partners, execute their solutions with urgency, and film the process using their own mobile devices––aided by Gutsy production crews.
Visibility
Videos are premiered at events, on social media, and across traditional news outlets.
What sets Gutsy Go apart? Our unprecedented approach to peacebuilding:
Based on a live media broadcast model, we developed a youth-driven tool for social change: affecting hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of hours.
In 72 hours, we transform cities into labs for peace by harnessing the collective brainpower and enthusiasm of a single age group. Through dozens of collective, simultaneous executions, shared across myriad channels, our results create an immersive wave of hopefulness that impacts an entire community.
Embracing “the crisis” as a fundamental and unshakeable part of the process, we impart life skills that current educational curriculums discount.
Gutsy Go works together with Finnish Youth Research Society and Duodecim, The Finnish Medical Association, to measure the efficacy of the Gutsy Go method––and its ability to increase feelings of self-worth and inclusivity across an entire age group within a target area. Gutsy Go decreases the risk of social isolation, polarization, and civil unrest.
Gutsy Go coheres the community into creating peaceful narratives for their city. Peace thrives in an environment of mutual trust.
Duodecim researches the effect hopefulness has on life expectancy and overall health. Research shows that cynicism plays a significant role in lowering life expectancy. Currently, an estimated 10% of students entering upper secondary school consider themselves to be cynical; this number doubles by the time they graduate. Duodecim agrees: Gutsy Go has the potential to increase hopefulness in young people on an unprecedented scale.
Now is the time to reinvent “peace.” Our vision is a world where every nation trains its population of young people to become peacebuilders––a generation with a collective understanding of trust, solidarity, and borderless action. A new activism model that transforms passive principles into fortified action. Gutsy Go harnesses Gen Z’s innate desire to serve, share, and impact our world. Their potential must not go to waste.
Gutsy Go is launching thousands of concrete, action-based solutions in an effort to combat increasing cynicism. Our platform provides a sense of solidarity, an unattainable concept in the current climate––until now. Real life connections between real people, sustainable solutions for resolving conflict, and inspiration for everyone. A generation that’s done talking.
The world’s problems are solvable––whether ecological, financial, pertaining to security or basic human rights––our capacity to forge peace is at the core of every solution. Cultivating peace rests on the dynamics of positive human interaction. Our program proves that diversity serves the greater good, that individuals get a sense of their own power when they experience that they are not alone. Gutsy Go is proof of the lightening speed at which consciousness is transformed.
The state of the world isn’t going to improve if we disregard the youth. Intrinsic motivation develops in young people when they engage in activities out of genuine interest and self-determination. Peaceful innovation is only possible when adults offer their support, their assistance, and their time––not by condescension or control.
