Communicorn wins Impact Award

“For us, this is a wonderful way to end Communicorn's first year,” said award winner Charlotte von Wulffen. The podcast launched in the spring with eight episodes. In September, the conference was added as a real-life gathering of the social innovation community in Lüneburg. “There, you could feel how much energy is generated when perspectives, experiences, and questions don't just stand side by side, but really come together,” said Wulffen, who accepted the award together with her colleagues Frederic Kohlhase and Lillan Lommel.

Where does the name Communicorn actually come from? The team truthfully reported that there had already been a Communicorn idea outside the team that was never implemented. “All the better,” says Charlotte von Wulffen, who helped develop this early idea, “that there is now a Communicorn project that brings joy to people and embodies the ideas of a cooperative, community-oriented economy.”

Cooperation instead of competition

The term has a playful connotation for the community, but now also has a clear meaning. Communicorn stands for Community Unicorn. In the startup world, unicorns are all about growth and valuations. But in social innovation, the focus is on how a community can be as effective as possible when cooperation, rather than competition, is at the center. Then it's not the valuation that counts, but the shared values, which create enormous added value for society. Entrepreneurship thus becomes collaborative action, the ability to tackle local problems together and develop sustainable solutions.

In eight episodes, the podcast was able to show what makes a community, how community is lived, and whether the theoretical approach of community entrepreneurship helps to make cooperation and solidarity tangible in Lüneburg. And the conference proved that there is no single approach, but rather many different fields, people, needs, and ways of living responsibility. “That moved us and probably also contributed to this award feeling so fitting at the end of the year,” concluded von Wulffen and the entire team.

A total of three winners received this year's Impact Award from the faculty. Among them was Communicorn, as well as the SINTRA project. It was honored for its learning journey, through which practitioners from 15 companies learn how to make their companies more socially inclusive by looking at examples from social enterprises such as HEYHO and Homeboy Industries. For Prof. Dr. Steffen Farny, who supervises both projects, this was a reason for double celebration before the holidays.