We designed and facilitated a three-day workshop for MSF in Amsterdam, welcoming its financial directors from all over the world. The main goals were to reconnect in person after a few years of distance, assess the present situation, learn from each others’ best practices and start designing the future of the organization. The workshop helped the participants to clarify priorities, highlighting the needs and changes to be made in order to make this unique and generous humanitarian organization even more sustainable and efficient.

Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is the creator and implementer of “microcredit”, a loan system for entrepreneurs who are too poor to obtain credit from traditional banking circuits. In June 2023, the Yunus Foundation organized the first “Italian Social Business Day” in Bologna to introduce the spirit of initiative “for a World with Three Zeros: Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, Zero Pollution”. The themes of the day were dedicated to the social and environmental challenges intertwined with business activities in our country and in the city of Bologna. Housatonic has participated facilitating the understanding of the themes and gathering ideas through a series of visualizations created in real time.

Our society is facing an unprecedented challenge: the enormous amount of data available at our fingertips, combined with the massive dose of fake news and disinformation, have generated a crisis of trust in information. SUM consists of an inclusive co-design process, which involves working with stakeholders, adults and elderly people, to welcome their needs and concerns. Housatonic is actively contributing to the design process of the activities and training, while also taking care of the graphic identity (logo, icons and the website).

Last Saturday we were in Genoa for a preview of Slow Food 2022 social report. The document provides an overview of the year in numbers and collects the tangible actions of the association, clearly stating their impact on the planet and its community. We’re happy to have contributed to these results as official Slow Food partners and we look forward to co-design future projects to promote a good, clean and fair being.

We participated to the PHD-SDC event, an opportunity created by the IUSS of Pavia to allow students of the various PhD classes to interact, get to know each other and discuss their research projects; three days full of conferences and group work on the issues promoted by the SDGs. We helped students digitally visualize their theories as they worked in parallel, and collected the key themes of the days in a large Knowledge Wall set up in the plenary hall. It was nice to understand together how important it is to have a visual representation of scientific theories that usually are almost inaccessible for non-experts.

The journey of the YOUZ Caravan ended in Marzabotto (near Bologna) after traveling across the Emilia-Romagna Region to collect inputs and comments on youth policies implemented by the Region, working in different contexts, always interesting and with grassroots incentives oriented towards change.

We hosted in our studio in Bologna the first meeting of the Consortium that unites us with Verificat and the University of Lapland and that will see us engaged for two years in a European project aimed at digital literacy and disinformation for Seniors, with a particular focus on how to recognize and analyze fake news.

We’re still Slow Food partners for 2023, and we are collaborating with them on the occasion of a training course dedicated to members: Food to Action Academy. It’s a series of meetings with a focus on various themes that will accompany us throughout the year, capturing what it means to promote Slow Food in our territories and in our daily actions. We’re visually facilitating the sessions as we too believe that awareness and knowledge can only be spread through education.

COP27 is the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, for this very important occasion we have created real-time and remote scribing, making the key concepts of all the meetings visible to all people connected to the online event! We thank Climate Champions, Ocean & Climate Platform and Water Action for having thought about us for this initiative.

What makes a tavern, or osteria, the place you can’t wait to go back to? Undoubtedly the hospitality. It’s what the hosts and hostesses of Italy told us during the meeting organized by Slow Food to discover the new Osterie d’Italia 2023 Guide. We have learned from this conversation that every choice counts: starting from how the restaurant’s entrance looks like, to the choice of raw materials and being good hosts for the guests. But most of all, being a tavern means having a desire to know others.