In all our areas of activity, we intent to launch work groups that are actively creating new solutions to the problems our society is facing.

In the work group on the topic of health, we focused on creating a new food distribution system. Since the food available in supermarkets is mostly processed, imported from far away and simply unhealthy, we wanted to enable urban citizens to get access to organic, local & seasonal food products.

At the kick off meeting, a few people from the association ‘Københavns Fødevarefællesskab’ (KBHFF) joined us. They wanted to solve the same problem, but lacked the technological infrastructure to offer solutions for a bigger customer base. What they had was a network of producers and clients, so something great to start with!

We decided that together we would find a way to build a new online platform for them, that then could also be used by other initiatives in the country and even internationally.

We did not have enough programmers to complete that task, so we designed a programming course (Holistic Web Development) that was made to educate unemployed people to become web developers in 5 months. One of our members was unemployed and interested to become a programmer, so we contacted the jobcenter and made an agreement that they would pay think.dk to offer that education to him. On top of this, 5 unemployed members of KBHFF joined that course so they would in the future be able to maintain that new platform themselves (they paid a reduced participant fee).

The course was facilitated by Martin, co-founder of think.dk, who is an experienced web developer, and had a strong focus on open source, energy efficient coding and ethical values.

After 5 month, the course was successfully completed. By now, think.dk created its first ‘spin off’, the company parentNode which is an ethical web development consultancy. Two of the course participants are now employed in that company, actively building the new platform for KBHFF, and one more is still in further training and will be employed by 2019. On top of this, one student is learning to improve his coding skills and two more volunteers are supporting the project with their coding skills.

The 2nd development stage was just finished successfully, and we are moving fast towards creating a whole new system for food distribution that we will share with anyone interested free of charge. We aim for nothing less than creating a viable alternative to supermarkets, cutting out all middle men and bringing truly fresh food to your table.

As soon as parentNode generates a profit, a share of that will feed back into think.dk to help financing the running costs of the Center.

And the next spin off is in the making just now - a sustainability consultancy to help companies reduce their ecological footprint, to be launched in January 2020.

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