From 15 to 19 June 2026, we had the joy of welcoming the REVIVE project team to
Oulu. Researchers from 6 countries: Lithuania, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Greenland and
Finland all gathered here in Northern Finland for four days of collaboration, learning,
and genuine human connection.
REVIVE stands for Restoring Ecosystems in the Face of Depopulation Via Innovation
and Entrepreneurship. It is an Erasmus+ project trying to answer the underlying
question: how do rural communities survive and thrive when people are leaving?
We started by heading out of the city. Our first stop was Nivala, a small industrial town
about two hours south of Oulu, where we visited the Nivala Industrial Village and met
the people behind Champion Door Oy Ltd. There is something grounding about
stepping into a real business, in a rural community, and seeing how entrepreneurship
takes shape far from the spotlight of major cities. We also had an introduction to the
MicroENTRE Microentrepreneurship Research Group at Kerttu Saalasti Institute,
University of Oulu by Martti Saarela and Santeri Halonen. These are exactly the kinds of
ecosystems REVIVE aspires to understand and support. It set the tone for everything
that followed.
On Wednesday, we drove up to Ii Municipality, which has quietly become one of
Finland’s most impressive examples of local climate action. The Climate Heroes
programme there was eye-opening. We met the mayor Marjukka Manninen and people
from Micropolis – Greener for Growth to learn about Ii municipality’s innovative solutions
in sustainability and ecosystems restoration. It is rare to see a small municipality take
sustainability so seriously and with such tangible results. But it also felt deeply
connected to the REVIVE mission: innovation as a tool for keeping communities alive,
relevant, and resilient!
In between the field visits, we spent one and half days on campus at Linnanmaa
recording content for the REVIVE Massive Open Online Course. We aspire that MOOC
will reflect these conversations, places, and so learners across globe can access and
learn from. We hope it does the stories justice.
And then there was the sauna evening. It is where conversations slow down, guards
come down, and something more honest tends to emerge. Our floating sauna night on
the Oulu river water was one of those evenings that will stay with people long after the
programme ends.
Thank you to everyone who travelled to be here. Hosting this group has been a genuine
pleasure and a reminder of why this kind of in-person, cross-border collaboration
matters!
