Goal for Mental Health
Markus Raivio and Aapo Kotkavuori on Kukunori and Walking Football
by Ambika Aggarwal
“My dream is for every person in the world to have a place where they can experience their lives as meaningful despite the challenges of mental health. The work is just beginning.”
Sport offers a unique opportunity for athletes, players, and fans to address mental health challenges, but this must be done with intention and care. We sat down with Markus Raivio is the co-founder of Kukunori and first Ashoka Fellow elected in Finland, and Aapo Kotkavuori the Project Manager at Kukunori, to hear their story and how they’ve worked to shift the narrative around mental health through sport.
They believe that sport — walking football in particular — is a solution for those in their community struggling with mental health challenges. Kukunori employs walking football, a small-sided, low-impact version of football (soccer) that is suitable for all levels of ability and fitness.
Q: Can you introduce yourselves and your work?
Markus: I’m the director of Kukunori which is a central association for culture and wellbeing in Finland, representing 52 member organizations. We are supporting approximately 17,000 people suffering from mental health issues of some kind. We are also working with people with substance abuse issues, and walking football is one of the projects we are working on.
Aapo: I am the project manager of the walking football project, and I’ve been working in Kukunori for 3 or 4 years now. Earlier I’ve been doing outreach youth work and I’ve also been playing football for my whole life. I still play as a hobby, and I am managing my own team. I studied social policy and I think one of the most interesting and important things for me in walking football is that I can combine my love of football and my studies while trying to help individual people, affect the whole culture, and change the way we see sports.
Q: Why did Kukunori choose to start focusing on walking football?
Markus: I think walking football is a very big part of our approach to mental health. It’s called a recovery approach, which takes a stand that, in between health and sickness, there’s different dimensions.
This means that, no matter how sick or healthy you are, it doesn’t really matter, the most important thing is that you are you. Healthy or sick. That’s something that really speaks to us.
We wanted to find out people’s dreams and what kind of hope people think there is tomorrow because there’s hope in tomorrow for everybody. We then asked this in one of the surveys, and I was just amazed that there were many people saying that their dream is that they could once, in their lives, be in a winning team. That was something that really made a big impact on us. At the same time a member of the board was visiting Scotland and there he saw this thing called walking football.
Social innovation is always about adapting models. By taking football and removing one aspect, running, we now have a totally different approach to how we can practice it in the most equal way. The running part makes it not very equal for everyone, because not everyone could play by running, but many of us can walk. With support from the social and health care ministry, we started to build teams and train people to manage their own teams across Finland. Now, we have established about 30–40 walking football teams.
Aapo: The beauty of the idea of walking football is that it is translatable to other sports, and it is highly accessible for people. It gives them a possibility to be part of the team and participate in sports and make it as accessible as possible by lowering the risk of injuries and lowering the fitness requirements.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced with this program?
Aapo: My biggest challenge is involving people for the first time. For example, there are a lot of older men that when they hear about walking football, they think it’s a little silly. Especially if they have played football before, they might think that this is some kind of joke, but if we get them to play or try walking football, most of them become engaged. Our experiences have been extremely satisfactory, and I’ve been really surprised by how well this has gone and how many teams there are now in Finland.
Markus: The most important challenge is thinking how to involve more organizations to take ownership of these teams. We only have Aapo here, so they cannot rely on our support forever, so they have to be so excited about this sport that they want to take ownership.
Another big opportunity is trying to scale deeper. This model can be translated to whatever sport; not just football. What other social sports are there?
What kind of sports support wellbeing, being not so lonely, or being engaged in something?
It could be something much broader than just walking football.
Q: Shifting to a broader scope, how do you see sports and social change landscape changing in the future?
Aapo: It sounds quite grandiose, but I would like to see a paradigm shift when it comes to sports. There’s so much competition in sports and I think that’s fine, but we should have other alternatives to it. People with mental health issues and substance abuse don’t have services targeted towards them. They are excluded from the sports services, and I think that is quite a big issue because they do need some things to be taken into consideration when we are planning the activities for them. They are not big things, but they should be taken into consideration, and I hope that we could be making small changes towards sports becoming more inclusive and less competitive because I think that sports could be a great way to promote the wellbeing of whole communities and of course individuals too.
Markus: Sport can also bring a very holistic approach. We cannot really separate the mind from the body and sport provides a holistic view.
It is not just about exercising, it is also about communicating with people, it is about hopes and dreams, and finding something you can be good at. It’s also part of their identity. Everything is identity in football.
Q: What are the critical partnerships needed in sport to embrace this new paradigm in the upcoming years?
Markus: The government is especially important. If you want to scale something, you must be good with the government, and we can see that coming from Nordic countries like Finland which we are quite established welfare countries. We understand that the position of NGOs in our countries is a unique situation, not every country has NGOs that are strong and very well-funded.
We need to find new ways to make this model into a social franchise type of idea.
This article is part of our “Sport for Changemaking” series — a collection of articles that examine how Ashoka Fellows around the world are utilizing sports to create impact and mobilize change. The series showcases the potential of sports as a tool for social transformation and provide insights into strategies, impact, challenges, and lessons learned. Sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date with Ashoka’s Sport for Changemaking initiative.
