Text: Laura Iisalo

Bilberries are great. They have many proven health benefits, they taste good, and there is an abundance of them in the Nordic forests. Yet for some reason only five to eight percent of the berries are being harvested each year, while the rest is left to rot.

– It is a huge economic loss. If we could create new bilberry products that people enjoy, then maybe that could inspire companies to better utilise this natural resource, says Shuxun Liu, a doctoral candidate who is studying Food Chemistry and Food Development at the University of Turku.

Liu has a particular interest in turning berries into wine. He first looked into the subject during his master’s degree in his native China. Although consumption of traditional grape wines has risen there in recent years, a majority of Chinese are not too keen on the dry taste and wine has never been considered a necessity either historically or culturally.

Instead Chinese people prefer Baijiu, a liquor made of fermented sorghum that can have up to 60% alcohol by volume but according to Liu, old drinking patterns are changing. In recent years, especially younger people have become more health-conscious and they tend to go for drinks that have a lower alcohol content.

To meet these new demands, local wine makers have started to produce berry wines and the trend is growing fast. It was no surprise that when Liu started his master’s degree in Beijing, his supervisors asked him to look into the science of berry wine fermentation.

– It was not me who chose berry wine production, it was berry wine production that chose me, he jokingly says.

At first Liu used conventional Saccharomyces yeast to see how that changed the chemical compound of local mulberries, goji berries and bog bilberries. During his second year Liu decided to experiment by using only the indigenous yeast that is naturally found in the skin of the berries.

In five years’ time, if everything goes smoothly, there might be a new high quality wine made of Finnish bilberries available to purchase.

– I discovered that spontaneous fermentation is very different to the Saccharomyces yeast and that it affected the berry wine significantly. I was like, wow; I knew I needed to investigate it further, he says.

From laboratory to consumers

In 2016 Liu arrived at Turku University to start a new project researching bilberry wine production – only this time his focus was on nonconventional yeasts and their impact on the quality of the wine.

During his four years of doctoral studies Liu experimented with more than ten different yeasts and discovered that each non-saccharomyces yeast has a unique character, and that two of them were performing better than expected.

By using these alternative yeasts he was able to ferment bilberry wines that had a lower alcohol content, less acidity, longer-lasting colour, and a more vivid aroma profile than wines that were fermented using conventional yeasts.

Liu’s next mission is to upscale his production from laboratory to industrial level by collaborating with suitable companies. In five years’ time, if everything goes smoothly, there might be a new high quality wine made of Finnish bilberries available to purchase.

–  The work is not done yet, but I hope so, because I do think that food science serves the public. The goal is to produce good products, Liu says.

You can read Liu’s thesis Fermentation with Non-Saccharomyces Yeasts as a Novel Biotechnology for Berry Wine Production here.

In 2020 M.Sc. Shuxun Liu received a 9000 euros grant for his doctoral thesis, Fermentation with Non-Saccharomyces Yeasts as a Novel Biotechnology for Berry Wine Production.

Text: Antti Kivimäki

Many traditionalist protest parties have accumulated significant support in recent years’ elections in Europe, particularly in more remote areas. aThis has come as a surprise to the big media houses, and their news pieces often wonder at who these parties’ supports actually are.

– Voters from remote districts are often referred to dismissively and end up misunderstood, says Anna Saraste, who works as a freelance journalist and a German assistant to the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation YLE.

She believes that this is because today’s mainstream media usually employ journalists with advanced academic degrees, most of whom already reside in larger cities.

– When Berlin-based or foreign journalists descend upon small Eastern German towns that are known for their xenophobia, they will find a local Neo-Nazi to interview. That is not particularly helpful in bridging the rural-urban gap, Saraste says.

Together with YLE’s long-term correspondent in Brussels, Petri Raivio, Saraste became aware of this chasm in understanding when populist parties riding on the agenda of closing the borders started repeatedly having success in many European countries’ elections. The journalists decided to write a documentary book that would give a voice without judgement to people in remote areas.

In the process of writing the book, Saraste has visited Eastern Germany and Eastern Poland. Raivio has been to Central Finland and will travel to remote areas in a fourth country as soon as the coronavirus pandemic allows it.

Initially, the book’s themes arose from rural opposition to internationalisation, but over time the connecting thread became increasingly tied to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are extracted and energy is produced in remote areas, while opposition to the fossil fuel economy comes mostly from trendy metropolitan centres.

– In East Germany under the Iron Curtain, the dirty miner walking home after his shift was society’s greatest hero. Now he feels like the greatest villain, as the government cuts off mining subsidies and eco-activists come down from Berlin to attend demonstrations demanding the speedy shutdown of mines, Saraste says.

She strives to describe the realities of remote areas without unnecessary polarisation, for example by using the perspective of an unschooled miner who is a keen user of library services. He understands that coal must be given up as an energy source, but is at the same time aware of the social distress of mining districts.

– Quite coincidentally, he was the first person I went to interview in the mining town of Weißwasser. Now we have been in touch a lot, and discuss all sorts of issues, for example Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. He is more well-read than many of my urban friends, Saraste says.

Fossil fuels are extracted and energy is produced in remote areas, while opposition to the fossil fuel economy comes mostly from trendy metropolitan centres.

Raivio was on a similar mission amid Central Finland’s marshy landscapes in Karstula, first meeting a local peat producer and then a local landowner who had turned their peat bog into a conservation area.

The peat producer explained in great detail how the permit process works these days, and how much tighter the controls are now on humus entering waterways.

– People used to be encouraged to enter the peat business, but quite soon the perspective shifted to peat production being something to close down altogether. Many find it hard to come up with anything else to do, however, and if this source of livelihood is cancelled, it will contributed to further depopulation of rural areas, Raivio explains.

He noticed that behind all their politeness, the people of Karstula shunned him at first as a representative of “the southern media”. When he explained the documentary nature of his book, they became more open.

– Peat producers are highly suspicious of the media, particularly the large media houses of the capital. They feel that representations of their business have previously been highly biased, Raivio says.  

Petri Raivio (Master of Social Sciences) and journalist Anna Saraste received EUR 11,500 in a grant from the Paavo Koskinen Fund on 27 February 2020 for writing an investigative book on the mental landscapes of people living in remote districts in Europe.

Text: Antti Kivimäki
Photos: EFC

There are more than 200,000 foundations in Europe, and a new one is established on average every four hours.

– Foundations struggle with very similar things all over the world, so it is constructive to discuss these issues with international colleagues, explains Antti Arjava, Secretary General of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

– Usually we find that others have reached the same conclusions as us, and that in itself is a meaningful and reassuring realisation.

The EFC has been facilitating these kinds of contacts and looking after foundations’ interests for three decades already. It has around 200 foundations as members, including ten from Finland but only two from Sweden. Arjava sees a certain contradiction in the fact that the EFC claims to represent European foundations before the European Commission, but as its members it only has just over one in one thousand foundations from the region.

– On the other hand, most of the biggest foundations are members, and the foundations’ ideas as to how they should be treated by the EU are mostly aligned, Arjava says.

In its dealings with the Commission, the EFC advocates, among other things, for the concept of the “European foundation”. This would mean a model foundation that would be acceptable for all the EU countries, and which could therefore operate without problems within the whole Union.

The tightening of anti-terrorism and money laundering legislation has caused foundations additional hurdles. They have to be able to prove to banks that their money does not originate from and is not channelled to criminal activity. Particularly payments coming out of the United States are under close scrutiny.

– From our point of view, this is a bureaucratic hassle. I have never heard of a case of foundations being used in Europe for money laundering or supporting terrorism. Of course, if there were no regulation, someone might decide to try, Arjava says.

The EFC also advocates for foundations being exempt from value-added tax.

Representatives of the Cultural Foundation often travel to Brussels and to the EFC’s general assembly and conference, which takes place annually in different parts of Europe. This networking event lasting a few days helps members stay abreast of activities at other foundations around Europe and other parts of the world. It also helps likeminded foundations find each other.

Additionally, professionals from member organisations can network, engage in joint projects and learn from each other within the EFC’s task forces and subcommittees.

– Each foundation has its own areas of emphasis, target groups and operating culture, but at the end of the day our communication methods and channels are fairly similar. It is nice to meet colleagues who have to solve similar issues in their work, says Annakaisa Tavast, Head of Communications at the Cultural Foundation, who sits on the EFC’s communications network with another twenty or so members.

The network’s semiannual communications meetings offer new perspectives, as well as good ideas and best practices.

– When a Norwegian foundation presented a feedback survey they use in their application system, I immediately realised we have to adopt a similar one, Tavast says.

The EFC was established in 1989. In spite of its name, it does not exclusively accept European foundations as members. Especially at the start, American foundations were an important part of the membership.

At that time, Eastern Europe was coming out from under the iron curtain, and there was a pan-European euphoria related to international collaboration between foundations.

American foundations were interested in helping Eastern Europe get back on its feet after the Cold War, in the same spirit in which the United States used its Marshall Plan to raise Western Europe from the smoking ruins of the Second World War to keep the Soviet Union’s influence from growing excessively.

– The Europe of today is significantly wealthier than when the Berlin Wall fell. From the perspective of American foundations, Europe is capable of looking after itself now, so their attention has shifted to Africa and Asia. The line that Trump uses with regard to defence policy, that why should the US pay for European defence while Europe accuses America of militarism, also applies to the world of foundations. Europe can now afford to fund its own organisations, Arjava says.

The EFC’s membership fee depends on the size of the member organisation. The Cultural Foundation pays EUR 7,000 per year for membership, plus another EUR 15,000 in voluntary contributions to the EFC. Many foundations pay even higher voluntary contributions.

Arjava has sat on EFC’s Management Committee since 2016. He has strongly advocated for the policy that new member foundations should have some sort of link to Europe – ownership in Europe, an office here or operations linked to the continent, as even the organisation’s rules state.

Even though many of the current American members no longer fulfil these criteria, they did when they joined.

The EFC has, however, been joined by foundations that have never had links to Europe. There have also been discussions around foundations that have no stable sources of income.

In the EFC’s rules, a foundation is defined as an organisation that has its own financial resources, which it considers how to deploy.

– If the organisation has to consider how to obtain those resources, it is not a foundation by these rules, even if it is legally defined as one, Arjava explains.

According to Arjava, the more non-European foundations the EFC includes, the more its operations will have to focus on global questions.

– Of course globalization is a significant issue for the largest European foundations. However, most foundations in Europe have by-laws that set much narrower limits for their operations, for example promoting the development of a city, region or country. For instance, the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s mission is to support culture in Finland, Arjava says.

– If more and more members with a global outlook join the EFC, then national and regional foundations will be less interested in joining, because the emphasis of discussions will be too far beyond their scope.

A separate source of tension in the field of European foundations arises from the fact that, depending on how it is calculated, the EFC is not the largest organisation representing foundations.

In many countries, foundations belong to national associations, such as the Association of Finnish Foundations, which has more than 200 members in Finland.

DAFNE (Donors and Foundations Networks in Europe) is a network of these national associations. It has thirty members, through which it indirectly represents more than ten thousand European foundations.

DAFNE’s office is in Brussels, in the same building as the EFC’s, and DAFNE considers that it, rather than its counterpart, should be the body that represents foundations before the Commission.

On the other hand, DAFNE was only established in 2006, based on an idea launched at EFC meetings. DAFNE has a much flatter organisation: only four employees compared to five times that at the EFC, which works directly with foundations and has a much larger work programme for its members and associated budget.

Arjava feels that it would be senseless for foundations to be represented by two competing organisations before the Commission.

– Brussels is too small for that. Additionally, in factual matters, the interests and perspectives of foundations are the same, regardless of who represents them.

For years, there has been talk – both behind the scenes and openly – of a possible merger between the EFC and DAFNE, and Arjava is a strong proponent.

– There was opposition to the merger for a long time, but now it might happen as soon as next year. Of course it is always difficult and time-consuming to discuss what the voting rights of each foundation and financing member should be, Arjava explains.

Text: Antti Kivimäki
Photos: EFC

The foundations sector is centuries old, but it has only grown significantly in recent decades.

The first large foundations were set up in the United States. In Europe, the majority of foundations were established after the Second World War, and in most European countries more than half of them are less than 30 years old. Europe has now overtaken the US in terms of total foundation assets.

In different countries, foundations have very different starting points.

Denmark may be the country with the most foundations per capita, as well as the biggest total foundation assets in proportion to GDP. The biggest corporations in Denmark are owned by foundations – such as the Carlsberg Foundation, the A.P. Møller Foundation (Almenfonden) or Nordea-fonden – and these donate funds for the public good.

In Germany, foundations often also have an industrial basis. When after the Second World War the government wanted to privatise Volkswagen, which had been nationalised by the Nazis, it was done by establishing VolkswagenStiftung, the Volkswagen Foundation, which today shares nothing but its name with the automotive giant. Similarly, the Robert Bosch conglomerate has a foundation as its majority owner.

In Italy, a large proportion of foundations are former savings banks, because legislation passed in the 1990s forced these to become foundations.

In Portugal, the enormous Gulbenkian Foundation wields significant influence. The Turkish-Armenian oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian owned five per cent of the then known Middle Eastern oil assets when he died. He bequeathed a large proportion of his wealth to a foundation that owns an art museum and funds an orchestra, among other things.

In Greece, a wealthy shipowner’s foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, not only builds hospitals but also relocated the National Library of Greece to share facilities with the Greek National Opera in an impressive new cultural centre in Athens.

In Southern Europe, as in the United States, foundations in general play a much bigger role in funding civic society and supporting marginalised groups. Comparatively, in Northern Europe, they have a narrower focus, funding the sciences and arts while leaving it to the government to hand out social assistance.

– The foundations that give out grants with a social basis have experienced an exponential growth in their website views and contacts since the start of the pandemic, says Annakaisa Tavast, Head of Communications at the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

– Foundations in some countries have had to reduce their spending due to this millennium’s financial crises, leaving some NGOs and civic organisations facing hardship. This would be hard to imagine in Finland, says Cultural Foundation’s Secretary General Antti Arjava.

Southern foundations may promote political views or take part in NGOs’ lobbying activities. An example mentioned by Tavast is the influencing campaign started by the Bodossaki Foundation in Greece at the start of the refugee crisis in 2015.

– The campaign included a video in which a cardboard box, spinning at the feet of multitudes in a busy street, goes unnoticed by most without a second glance, symbolised a refugee in need of assistance. It tried to encourage people to help in the humanitarian crisis, Tavast says.

In Finland, foundations primarily fund academic disciplines and culture, although these can be loosely defined. They do not necessarily aim for social change, but remain, according to their by-laws and due to the diversity of their donors, neutral, often emphatically so. Naturally, there are exceptions.

France is not a big country for foundations, because the focus there is on public rather than private funds, in the spirit of the French Revolution of 1789. The Fondation de France, which is comparable to the Finnish Cultural Foundation, has a semi-public character. Similarly, in Austria, the foundations sector is fairly underdeveloped.

The legislation that regulates foundations varies from one European country to the next. The definitions of “foundation” differ, as do the requirements set for them, but generally the largest foundations operate for the public good and in similar ways.

In the United States, a higher level of activity is required of foundations than in Europe: they must spend at least five per cent of their assets in an average year. There is no such requirement in Europe, and the average spend here is around four per cent per annum. The Cultural Foundation’s average is just under four per cent of assets each year.

Eastern and Eastern Central Europe have seen a big rise in the establishment of foundations since the decline of socialism, but their desire to fund things often exceeds their actual assets.

Russia also has its foundations. For example, the foundation bearing the name of Vladimir Potanin, the oligarch who made his fortune during the privatisation of banks after the fall of the Soviet Union, is involved in the European Foundation Centre’s (EFC) activities.

– In Russia, operations cannot be autonomous of the government. Foundations have less flexibility than in the West, but it is possible for them to donate to culture and the sciences in Russia, too, says Antti Arjava.

Nor are foundations unheard of in China. In 2016, EFC organized its first China-Europe Philanthropic Leadership Platform programme funded by the German Stiftung Mercator, inviting ten Chinese and ten European participants to Brussels for ten days to enhance their strategic and change leadership skills. The programme now runs annually and the location alternates between Brussels and China, though this year, due to the pandemic, it takes place online.

The Finnish Cultural Foundation was represented by its Director of Cultural Affairs, Juhana Lassila. Some of the global trends identified by Lassila are the fact that foundations are increasingly aiming to bring about change and to solve global problems.

– This is why they invest heavily in social and political influence. Achieving such overarching goals requires more and more partnerships, not just between foundations but also with other stakeholders, such as commerce and industry. These days impact is a buzzword, Lassila says.

The Cultural Foundation is actively involved in the international foundations field and its management, for example through the The Hague Club and the European Foundation Centre (EFC). There are also yearly meetings between Nordic foundations. In 2019, the meeting was hosted by Helsinki and had nearly 170 participants from the whole Nordic region.

The Cultural Foundation has not previously collaborated on initiatives with foreign foundations; now, it is involved in a joint research funding programme for the humanities and social sciences together with the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, the Brita Maria Renlund Foundation, and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation to provide grants for the investigation of the social challenges of the twenty-first century.

The Cultural Foundation’s Board decided that if good applications are received by the programme, the Cultural Foundation can contribute EUR 0.5–1 million to its grants.

– The Cultural Foundation’s mission is national, but it is wise to seek operating models beyond our borders. The Nordic societies are similar enough in nature for this kind of programme to offer the necessary synergies, Lassila says.

Is there anything unique about the Finnish Cultural Foundation or Finland on a global scale?

The fact that the Cultural Foundation was started up by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Finns is a nearly unheard-of phenomenon around the world. In other respects, Antti Arjava says that foundations’ activities are similar all over.

– What is fairly unusual is the Finnish custom of handing out individual grants to artists and researchers. The larger foundations around the world seek impact by making large one-off grants, preferring to give higher lump sums to a whole university or a large research group.

Even though foundations are sitting on billions of euros in assets, they are not a major operator compared to national governments. If the funds of all the European foundations that support academic disciplines were put together, they could fund European academia annually for only a single week, and the rest would have to come from governments.

– The strength of foundations lies in the fact that they can make decisions more freely and quickly than governments, Arjava says.

Investment Directors Meet at EFFIO

The chief investment officers of the large European foundations get together a couple of times a year within the EFC’s European Foundation Financial and Investment Officers Group (EFFIO) – once a year in the EFC offices in Brussels and once hosted by one of its members. This year’s meetings have been conducted remotely.

EFFIO has some thirty members, representing around ten countries and a total of approximately EUR 100 billion in assets.

– The legal and tax frameworks vary between European countries. Still, the challenges of long-term investing are the same for all of us: how to maintain a sufficient amount of capital that enough of it will be available for our charitable purposes,” explains Ralf Sunell, Chief Investment Officer at the Finnish Cultural Foundation and long-term member of EFFIO.

These challenges are discussed in EFFIO using the Chatham House Rule: participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speakers may be revealed. Trust and confidentiality are two of the basic pillars of EFFIO’s activities. This allows the investment directors to disclose to each other what asset classes (e.g. property, bonds, stocks) they invest their funds in so that they can maintain their foundations’ capital and ensure there is enough of it to share.

EFFIO’s members also respond to annual surveys on their investments and returns. Their responses are compiled into a report that is only for members, which allows them to compare their own performance to that of their peers.

– It is not a competition, but comparisons are always useful. Each foundation has its own asset-related targets and different levels of risk tolerance, which is of course reflected in returns,” Sunell explains.

In their meetings, the peers also discuss responsible investment and sustainable asset distribution levels, and try to predict global political and economic challenges to come.

– Currently our British colleagues are battling with Brexit and how the pound should be viewed as a home currency when investing.”

Because EFFIO’s members include some of Europe’s largest foundations, it is easy for them to obtain high-level speakers from the European Commission, parliaments, universities, asset management and other stakeholder groups.

EFFIO is also in contact with its American counterpart, FFOG (Foundation Financial Officers Group), with which it holds a joint meeting once every five years or so.

Text and photo: Laura Iisalo

Osteoarthritis is the most common type of arthritis, a joint disease that affects up to 20 per cent of the population at some stage in their life. It has a lot of health-associated problems, and can often lead to early retirement.

The current treatments include non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, repairing the damaged cartilage area with biomaterial refill, or replacing the affected joint with a prosthetic implant. All options are suboptimal and come with side effects such as risk of infection and even increased mortality, while the costs to the public health system are significant.

– The common perspective has been that osteoarthritis affects old and obese people, and is caused by wear and tear of the joints. We now know that it is caused by many factors yet the disease is not widely understood and that’s why treatment options are limited, says Gonçalo Barreto, a postdoctoral researcher at Helsinki Rheumatic Diseases and Inflammation Research Group at the University of Helsinki.

Originally from Porto in Portugal, Barreto got interested in the subject during his master studies in biomedical engineering, and deepened his understanding by obtaining a PhD at the University of Helsinki by looking into how osteoarthritis evolves from immunological perspective.

– We looked at the main factors that lead to inflammation in joints so that we could figure out specific biomarkers for the disease. That way it is easier to see what stage of disease the patient has, and how the disease is progressing, Barreto explains.

Osteoarthritis and cartilage damage go hand in hand

Taking his research further, Barreto is currently looking into gene editing in order to find out whether it could be applied to invent better treatment options for osteoarthritis in the future. The research project is partly funded by The Finnish Cultural Foundation.

– We now know that certain genes and molecules are particularly important when trying to prevent the disease. We use a famous gene editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9, which allows us to read the DNA and change the gene to stop its activation, he tells.

Because osteoarthritis goes hand in hand with cartilage damage, it is vital to treat both.

Patients with osteoarthritis always have cartilage damage, and on the other hand, if cartilage damage is left untreated, patients will inevitably develop osteoarthritis later in life.

– When the cartilage starts to break down, it releases fragments, which are known to lead to inflammation response. We try to block that within the cell by going to the particular molecule that we know that mediates the signalling of this receptor. By targeting just one master molecule we can shut down the main inflammatory factors responsible for cartilage degradation and osteoarthritis disease development, he explains.

Applying gene editing could reduce several risk factors

Applying gene editing could streamline the current two-step surgery that is often required in the conventional treatment method, which is performed by taking the cells from the patient, manipulating them in the laboratory, and then injecting them back in an additional surgery.

– The proposed gene edited allogeneic chondrocytes are off-the-shelf ready, and so all we need to do is to inject them with a hydrogel when the cartilage damage is being fixed in the operating theatre. It is less risky in that way, Barreto says.

Right now Barreto and his team are working in laboratory conditions to demonstrate that the tissue in the cartilage can indeed be protected and repaired by blocking the inflammatory stimulus. If the method proves effective they will test in on animals and if successful, humans.

– If our research is effective, it might open the perspectives of having similar approaches in genome editing to treat osteoarthritis, and even other arthritic conditions. We are still in early stages but so far the results have been promising.

Postdoctoral researcher Goncalo Barreto received a 30 000 euro grant in 2020 to study how gene editing could be applied to treat the common joint disease.