Otso Sillanaukee

Otso aims to ensure that Demos Helsinki is focusing on the right questions related to people and organisations’ agency in building a fair, sustainable, and joyful next era. His accountabilities include identifying impact opportunities, ensuring projects run smoothly towards their goals, and supporting the team’s wellbeing and motivation to tackle the most pressing global challenges from ecological crises to injustice. Otso is also Demos Helsinki’s go-to senior expert on circular economy and sustainability.

Otso believes that by bringing together different actors to reimagine their agency and operations in tackling environmental crises is essential for building a future within planetary boundaries. In doing this, Otso’s work ranges from the grassroots level with advancing sustainable lifestyles and practices to exploring how private and public sector organisations could transform and steer the green transition. In addition, through topics of biodiversity and changing nature relationships, Otso is increasingly interested in building the agency of Nature in this era. He is a highly seeked-after speaker on these topics.

Prior to Demos Helsinki, Otso has worked with sustainable marketing and public relations. He has also implemented a more sustainable lifestyle on a personal level and shared his experiences through his popular blog Nollahukka and book Zero Waste – jäähyväiset jätteille (Kustantamo S&S).

At Demos Helsinki, Otso has worked with, e.g., supporting ministries in building and implementing the national strategic Circular Economy programme, studying the changing nature relationships influencing how we run our societies, developing the Think Sustainably service to accelerate sustainability action of people and companies, and on researching the implications of Circular Economy on security.

In his free time, Otso has recently started cultivating an edible garden. With plums, beans, gooseberries, courgettes, and various wild and ornamental flowers already thriving, he is constantly on the lookout for new ways to foster an ecosystem that provides for both the people and the other species sharing the land.