Microsoft invests in local programs that benefit people of all ages. In Sweden, our collaborations are organized by our focus areas of Skills for Jobs, Enabling Sustainability, and Empowering Communities.
The following program list contains a sample of the investments Microsoft makes on an annual basis.
Skills for Jobs
Microsoft believes everyone should have access to the skills, technology, and opportunity they need to succeed in a changing economy.
Rädda Barnens Riksförbund (Save the Children) is the world’s largest independent child rights organization. Its work saves and improves children’s lives around the world. Its goal is to ensure that children have access to healthcare, food, shelter, and essential learning and child protection services when they need them the most. Its commitment is to help every child reach their full potential by ensuring they grow up healthy, receive a quality education, and stay safe.
- Empowering Children Through Music and Tech Skills: Create Sessions For a Better Day takes place in a music studio established by Tim Bergling Foundation (Avicii) that is easily accessible to children to meet on a regular basis. Through Create Sessions, music and creativity tools are used to promote mental health among children.
- Tjej-och killsnack (Girls and Boys Groups) provides discussion groups for girls and boys between the ages of 9 and 16. The purpose of these groups is to empower the participants, enhance their knowledge about their rights, provide opportunities for active and meaningful leisure time, and encourage them to engage in new contexts and environments.
- LillaRB developed a children’s website with the help of children as editors, encompassing subjects identified by the children themselves.
Skolidrottsforbundet i Skåne wants to create a positive athletic environment where both social and cultural aspects are natural ingredients of the activities in which both children and youth are developed into independent people. They achieve this by having the school sports associations (SSAs) offer an enriching after-school activity, giving young people the possibility for a versatile conduct of sports. This counteracts early specialization, offering young people versatile training and leaders and coaches. In addition, various activities are held providing democratic education, knowledge, and self-esteem.
- Developing Young Leaders in Staffanstorp & Skåne will help to establish local SSAs with a starting point in Staffanstorp and nearby parts of the region. An SSA is a platform for young leaders to develop their leadership skills by offering free activities for kids to exercise in a fun and playful environment.
- Vårabarnsframtid (Our Children’s Future) runs two community projects to support social inclusion, healthy lifestyles, leadership skills, and access to club programs for wider community.
- Ung Kraft introduces youth to digital media and tech. Based in Gävle and Sandviken, this program provides learning enrichment programs for local youth in movement, music, media, and technology.
- Save the Children Sweden: KRAFT – Youth Empowerment aims at contributing to sustainable livelihoods and integration of youth (15–24 years old) in the labor market. It provides support to improve mental well-being, inclusion, and employment.
Ung Foretagsamhet Skåne (Young Entrepreneurship Skåne) educates and inspires entrepreneurship in as many students as possible at primary and secondary schools. Its long-term goal and mission is to contribute to skills provision and sustainable societies.
- Ung Företagsamhet will include an overall partnership between Microsoft and UF Skåne and a program supporting the development of entrepreneurship in elementary schools in Staffanstorp and the wider Skåne region. The project delivers workshops with an extra focus on the impact technology can have on students through the national project called Skolhackathon (school hackathon), with Minecraft education as a technical tool to convert a physical build up to a virtual society.
Kodcentrum is a Swedish nonprofit organization that introduces youth in Sweden to computer science, programming, and digital skills free of charge, while simultaneously broadening the perception of who can code and what is made up of code. It does this through activities for children as well as training programs for teachers and educators that help strengthen their abilities to teach children digital skills. The purpose is to ensure digital democracy and secure future workforce competency needs. Kodcentrum does this by facilitating Swedish youth to learn foundational digital skills and computer science regardless of their socioeconomic background, ethnicity, or gender. Its mission is to awaken an interest in programming and digital skills and to give every child the opportunity, confidence, and ability to create with code.
- Introducing Swedish children to digital technologies aims to democratize technology education with free programming lessons, tutorials, and coding activities for children ages 9–13. Kodcentrum, with Microsoft funding, offered online training and digital curriculum support, including online hackathons and expert mentorship for coding projects.
- Leadership program for young women introduces them to IT/tech as a possible future career path. The program aims to inspire women that they are essential for future innovation through workshops, basic programming skills education, mentorship by female role models, as well as volunteering with younger children to empower them in their own role as leaders.
Rapatac ensures that all children participating in its activities reach the school’s knowledge requirements and have an enriching and inspiring leisure time throughout their upbringing.
The activities offered encompass the fields of basic technical education, chemistry, art, music, dance, and other media, with special emphasis placed on the promotion of reading. In addition, support with homework provides children with new learning opportunities and encourages students’ creative abilities. The highly qualified staff at the center create a friendly and inspiring environment, ensuring that the organization’s main objective of providing secure and meaningful growth for children and youth at Rapatac benefits the entire community of Sandviken.
- Rapatac NPO Digital enabled Rapatac to digitally reimagine and transform its business process through Microsoft technology products, services, and solutions.
Stiftelsen Uppåkra Arkeologiska Center will be northern Europe’s most boundless, vibrant, and innovative place for archaeology, relevant in the present for many people. In Uppåkra, the past is not finished and arranged, it changes with every spade, before our eyes, and forces us to rewrite history. Through research, evaluation and pedagogy, the Center wants to develop this multidimensional place into a meeting place for everyone.
- Uppåkra Model Minecraft Skill Builder & World Development brings history to life with Minecraft. Researchers at Uppåkra Foundation have collaborated with Microsoft to develop a Minecraft version of the archeological site [https://local.microsoft.com/blog/bringing-history-to-life-for-children-at-uppakra/]. The game lets students interact with real scientists and follow the excavation as it progresses, learning about history and archeological methods along the way.
NTI Lund Games is a not-for-profit organization based at NTI Gymnasiet Lund that delivers community training programs to support the development of digital skills in the region.
- CompTIA Teacher Training Grant ensures that students at NTI Gymnsiet Lund have the best conditions to be able to certify themselves and become employable in the IT industry. The members were also trained in running a nonprofit association within the framework of gaming (both data and board games) and certification in IT.
Sandviken DCA is a nonprofit association that works for an increased digital level of competence in the region, improved integration, and a positive and sustainable social development. By creating a world-class datacenter, Sandviken DCA strengthens the region’s attractiveness and competitiveness through increased digitalization and social development.
- Educational and development initiatives partner with the libraries in Gävle and Sandviken during E-citizens Week for lectures and activities, and with Young Entrepreneurs in Sandviken and Gävleborg County for scholarships to encourage IT careers.
- Sandviken DCA Expansion – Server & Networking Courses provided digital skills to the next generation of IT technicians. This involved classroom practical training in the lab provided by Microsoft. The participating students received expert level training with the information needed to become certified by CompTIA at the various levels of A+, Server+, and Network+.
- Digital Inclusion & Summer Camps at Sandback Science Park provides numerous programs to reach all ages. A three-week camp for children and young people is intended to increase interest in technology, problem solving, and coding, regardless of prior knowledge. For seniors, a program provides support and knowledge in using digital technology and digital services. And for adults who have difficulty with language, economics, or for some reason have ended up outside the digital world, another program provides basic computer skills.
Enabling sustainability
Climate change requires swift, collective action and technological innovation. We are committed to meeting our own goals while helping communities to do the same.
Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) advances the science, practice, and policy of ecological restoration to sustain biodiversity, enhance resilience in a changing climate, and re-establish an ecologically healthy relationship between culture and nature. SER’s goals include building the knowledge base needed to implement effective ecological restoration, supporting on-the-ground (and in the water) standards-based ecological restoration implementation, and ensuring ecological restoration delivers beneficial outcomes for both nature and people, including addressing the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change.
- White Stork as an Ambassador for Wetlands aims to restore a viable population of white stork and the wetland ecosystem habitat. White stork populations will be augmented and supported, and wetland conditions will be assessed for future restoration, focusing on maintaining and developing their carrying capacity (after a century of drainage) to expand arable land, with the goal of revitalizing the white stork population and other native wetland plants and wildlife.
Riksforbundet Stada Sverige has a vision of a litter-free Sweden cleaned by enthusiastic young athletes on their way to fulfil their dreams. Its purpose is to contribute to the existence of active sports for youths done by organizing environmental clean ups. Its ambition: clean all of Sweden.
- Stada Sverige Staffanstorp is a nonprofit organization to organize environmental projects, picking litter outdoors, with sport clubs all over Sweden. Youths learn about littering and a change in behavior is established in a relatively early age. For their commitment, the associations receive a donation to support their sport activities. The cleanup activities take place in the youths’ neighborhood and always with local connection.
ChangeX International helps to create thriving communities everywhere by democratizing change, ensuring proven innovations and finance are accessible to everyone, everywhere. ChangeX is a community engagement platform that, with Microsoft’s support, has funded more than 500 groups in communities across Europe and the United States since 2015. Funds are repeated often throughout the years.
- ChangeX Sweden – Community Fund for Staffanstorp, Sandviken, and Gävle allows Microsoft to engage with diverse and hard-to-reach groups, ensuring community funds are widely accessible, particularly for lower-income and communities of color, through a simple, easy-to-use platform. With funding from Microsoft, ChangeX launched local projects around the theme of environmental sustainability, digital skills, and community prosperity, contributing to more sustainable and livable communities.
- School garden projects were funded in all three communities of Staffanstorp, Sandviken, and Gävle.
- ChangeX Sweden – DCCD Community Environmental Sustainability Fund spans across the Gävle, Staffanstorp, and Sandviken communities in Sweden, focused on delivering community environmental programs that are locally developed and delivered.
Future Position X (FPX) is an independent digital innovation hub based in Gävle. FPX supports development and growth to promote health and well-being for the citizens of the smart, sustainable, viable community. FPX provides both technology and expertise to contribute to data-driven community solutions.
- Hack4Gävle was designed in collaboration with Microsoft and Gävle Municipality for participants to devise practical solutions for a real challenge to climate neutrality. The participants worked in groups to come up with suggestions on how and in what way the group thought a problem should be solved.
Empowering communities
Microsoft is committed to strengthening communities and empowering the organizations that help them thrive. Whether affected by a recent emergency or decades of challenges, we use data, technology, and strategic investments to restore and support them for future generations.
Stromsbro Idrottsforening is a sports club with a wider vision for the impact the club can make in society. Strömsbro IF wants to be involved in influencing, improving, and making a difference in society.
- Vårabarnsframtid (Our Children’s Future) and Sommarglädje (Summer Joy) are social community projects that will contribute to a sustainable society with safe children and young people, who are given the opportunity to build their own future with the help of various sub-projects.
SAIK Bandy is an organization for exercising the sport of bandy and other activities that contribute to good health and well-being.
- Sandvikens AIK/BK is focused on increasing mobility and well-being among young people, particularly girls, by providing new opportunities for them to get involved in physical activity, develop their leadership skills, and engage with role models in the community that can promote their ambition and overall well-being. The project will also have a special focus on children of refugees to improve integration into society.
- Sandvikens AIK/BK is focused on developing SAIK Bandy’s aims to be a club for both men and women from all parts of the community. It provides support for a range of activities to create opportunities for new community members to meet and integrate into the community.