Helmut Schmidt Future Festival meets Finnish Head of Government Sanna Marin
2023-05-09 More than 40 young social changemakers from Austria, Switzerland and Germany have been working towards this moment at the first Helmut Schmidt Future Festival at Leuphana University. They presented their ideas for tomorrow at a poetry slam in front of an audience of 1,000 on the stage of Hamburg's Thalia Theatre. The outgoing Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, was also present. She received this year's Helmut Schmidt Future Prize on the same evening.
In her acceptance speech, the current head of government emphasised the outstanding importance of democracy and innovation for shaping a better future. Following the award ceremony, the festival participants from Lüneburg were able to meet Sanna Marin directly on the Thalia stage to exchange views with her on democratic political change.
Under the question "What makes the new good?", Leuphana, together with the Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT and THE NEW INSTITUTE, invited young social changemakers to the first Helmut Schmidt Future Festival on the Lüneburg campus on 3 and 4 May. The author and net activist Kübra Gümüşay emphasised in the opening event: "A central problem of our present is to create an illusion of freedom, which is based on not having to deal with the consequences of one's own actions". During the Future Festival, the tension between innovation and responsibility was brought into focus. Based on their own projects and ideas, the participants developed common visions of the future during the festival days.
In order to combine a far-sighted view of the possible with a close look at concrete changes, the participants were accompanied by six impulse-givers. Anne Lamp, Jacob Bilabel, Emilia Fester, Van Bo Le-Mentzel, Philipp von der Wippel and Frederic Penz supported the project groups with insights from their forward-looking practice. Emilia Fester shared her impressions from the festival days during the award ceremony of the Helmut Schmidt Future Prize: "I was invited as a member of the Bundestag and got to listen to great young people discuss their own ideas and their visions for the future. It was deeply impressive what the young people put together."
In her acceptance speech, award winner Sanna Marin encouraged the participants of the Future Festival to continue to work for their projects and visions. From the very beginning, her political work was also guided by the desire to assume social responsibility and to help shape change: "When I was 20, I realised: Nobody else is doing enough. So, it is also my responsibility to do something, not somebody else's. To do something that I really believe in". Her commitment to value-oriented politics, social cohesion and climate protection make her a pioneering personality for democracy in times of crisis.
In collaboration with theatre-maker Ella Elia Anschein, the participants developed a poetic recording of the festival results for the stage of the Thalia Theater. As the jury chairman of the Helmut Schmidt Future Prize, Uwe Jean Heuser, pointed out, the results of the festival go beyond this: they form the prelude to a young platform of ideas that is to develop into a sustainable network for social change-makers.
