Lyfta is 4!

We wanted to mark the occasion nevertheless with a blog post to reflect on what we've managed to achieve with your support and to share some key milestones, as well as some of our hopes and dreams for the future.

The path for Lyfta over the last four years has been a long and windy one but our guiding light and reason for being has remained consistent throughout and that is stronger now than ever.

The Lyfta story started many years before Lyfta was founded, when we travelled to Awra Amba, a beautiful village in Ethiopia that has reimagined and put into practice a new societal model. Awra Amba's inspiring and powerful story was pretty much the opposite of anything we had seen about Ethiopia in the mainstream media and, as idealistic documentary filmmakers, we were compelled to try to share this through our favourite medium - documentary film. We spent a number of months in Awra Amba over the years, and as we got to know the community better, we came to the realisation that we didn't just want to make a documentary about this place - we wanted to work with the community to make it possible for people to visit and explore Awra Amba for themselves. This desire; to share human stories in a more experiential and interactive way, is what drove us to enter the world of immersive storytelling over a decade ago.

We believed that bringing real human stories to people through a more immersive experience would make it easier for viewers to see new perspectives and develop empathy for the people they met in the stories. When we completed the first version of the immersive interactive documentary and started to present it to audiences (late 2013), the impact was immediately apparent. The experience of creating and showing this piece of work in the early days was transformational from a personal point of view and cemented our mission firmly in our hearts and minds.

The response to The Awra Amba Experience and our desire to create stories by combining 360° technology with cinematic storytelling and interaction design inspired us to produce two more immersive storyworld series, Secrets of the Opera and Dinnertime 360. This led to us being recognised as the leading interactive documentary makers in Finland.

By this time, more teachers were beginning to see the benefits of using Lyfta to teach global citizenship and to develop 21st Century skills and values, and we were managing to generate some noise. We were humbled and delighted to win a string of awards and recognition for our work (if you're interested you can look at some of these on our impact page). We were also delighted to be recognised by Helsinki-based Education Alliance Finland, a collective of teachers and education experts, who conducted a detailed independent evaluation of Lyfta and gave us an outstanding rating and 92% for pedagogical value.

At the end of 2018 we were selected to be one of the CPD delivery partners on the Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning (CCGL) programme, which is supported by the British Council and DFID. Through this valuable initiative we have been able to provide free training and access to Lyfta for hundreds of state-funded schools across England and Scotland. This year over 90% of teachers that have participated in our course have rated it extremely or very valuable; a statistic that our whole team is very proud of.

As we started to work with more and more schools in England we decided it was time to create a stronger presence in the UK and we opened our London office last summer. This was one of the best decisions we have made and since then we have developed Lyfta in a way that we couldn't have imagined 4 years ago.

Lyfta has evolved from four initial founders to a team of 21 based in London, Helsinki, and France. We have always felt that it is the team and the working culture that are the most important ingredients to creating a successful organisation.

We are fortunate to work with an absolutely phenomenal group of people and regularly speak about this with each other. We are so, so grateful - for our colleagues, our investors and our advisers. Everyone who has joined Lyfta has done so because they believe in our mission and each one has a strong desire to make a difference in the world. Empathy, honesty, transparency and creativity have been identified by our team as some of our key lived values.

Lyfta was created with the desire to inspire future generations to make a positive impact in the world through inspiring human stories and we have been working hard over the last four years with our teacher community towards this shared purpose.

Today, we are proud to say that we have:

The next iteration of Lyfta is currently being rolled out in Finland, in partnership with the National Agency for Education and Sitra (the National Innovation Agency), and will soon be available to teachers in the UK, bringing many more interactive storyworlds, lesson, assembly plans and increased functionality to users.

Sadly, the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the CCGL programme, which means that while hundreds of teachers who had booked on pre-lockdown are still being funded to complete their courses, there is a pause on the funding of new courses in England for the time being. This is a setback for us, as we have recruited much of our UK team and developed many of our processes to serve the requirements of this fantastic initiative. The funded online CPD course has enabled us to empower many hundreds of teachers to make impact through teaching global citizenship with Lyfta - without charging schools. After a long period of promoting this offer, which has resulted in new bookings coming in at a higher rate than ever, we found ourselves in a complex situation.

Having thought long and hard about this, we have made a decision as an organisation to continue to deliver the CPD training and offer access to Lyfta free of charge for new cohorts of state-funded schools for the next few months by working extra hard to fund and resource this ourselves. We are very grateful to be part of the CCGL programme and feel that it is in all of our interests for the course to continue. The British Council supports our decision and will continue to issue certificates to course completers for as long as we can carry on.

While this might seem counterintuitive in business terms, we know it's the right thing to do in the current circumstances and especially to support an already strained education sector. More than ever, children need opportunities to see beyond their everyday reality and to have access to enjoyable, enriching learning opportunities. We invite schools to take the opportunity to work with us on this now.

The British Council assures us that there is every chance that the funding may continue in the not too distant future, which we very much hope will be the case.

The one thing that has remained consistent over the years is our passionate desire to inspire and empower teachers and children to grasp their role in building a fairer, more sustainable world. We wish to see a future in which our shared humanity come first, and where we care for the environment to ensure our children and their children have a safe place to grow up and thrive.

Our vision is that Lyfta becomes a learning platform with human stories from every country in the world. Our dream is that by the time a child completes their education, they would have been to every country in the world, having experienced real human stories in each place they visited. They'd have seen numerous life situations, jobs, skills, values, perspectives - all at play in the real world. They'd be able to see for themselves how interconnected and interdependent we all are - and we believe that this will not only have a profound positive impact on the individual learning journeys of the children, but also on their lives, on society, and on our world in years to come.