Linna, who has a wide variety of interests, took up song writing last summer and found it both enjoyable and confidence-boosting, something she wanted to share with others. She began exploring how she might do that, and after meeting GreenHouse director Tania Del Matto and watching a TED talk about being able to lead powerfully when you understand your motivation, Linna decided to join GreenHouse this summer “to be in a place where other people believed (like I do) that helping others and making the world a better place is worthwhile.”
Balancing school with developing her ideas has been challenging. She also recognized, through conversations with Brendan Wylie-Toal, Green House’s Program Manager and Startup Coach, that she was in love with her solution but that she was having difficulty pinning down the problem it was solving. Discouraged, Linna thought about abandoning her idea altogether to do something completely different, but her new idea proved to be too massive and complex.
She returned to the heart of her original idea, asking herself a series of questions. Her question about how she could involve others in music without them feeling scared led to her wondering how people could have fun freely, and then how could she help people to experience childhood again, to how could she get people to relive the experience of playing with Lego. She tested this last idea out with a group of GreenHouse innovators and recognized that the combination of playing with Lego while making music helped melt some of the anxiety of making music.
Linna then connected with a community partner working with teen songwriters and began developing a workshop to help these aspiring songwriters and others develop their creativity by building props out of Lego and building a rhythm or group of words around it.
Being part of the GreenHouse community has been instrumental to Linna’s development as a social entrepreneur—in fact, she says that only when she is in community does she feel that she is truly engaging in social innovation. She appreciates the give and take of the community, both brainstorming and helping others with challenges on their own projects, and receiving feedback on her own project.
“The GreenHouse community helps me learn skills and provides an outlet for my ideas. It’s a community of creative-minded people who have a lot of energy and who know how to have fun.”
Her connection with GreenHouse has also helped Linna move from the zigzagging of potential projects seeking to reach an enormous audience to focusing her energy on a specific project that will help aspiring songwriters. “Sometimes I’ve been in my own head and I feel like my project isn’t working, but when I piloted it, I found that my project came to life. Having that community of supportive and open-minded people is really important to me—I haven’t found that in many other places.”