My Best Village – a matchmaking app between people and places
A matchmaking app between people and places. With the purpose of giving people who want to move to rural areas a digital and interactive tool to find their dream village.
At the same time, giving these rural villages the opportunity to market themselves in an easier and innovative way so they can grow their population and keep evolving in a sustainable manner. A win, win concept. Scalable to a global market.
‘My Best Village’ is a smart and innovative idea to address regional development challenges in depopulating rural regions everywhere. The solution is a digital matchmaking service that connects urban dwellers with rural areas and helps people find and relocate to their dream village.
The idea taking care of the issue for rural areas to get contact with people in urban areas that want to move to the countryside. Many rural areas wish to grow their population to survive and thrive.
It will at the same time simplify for people that likes to work and live remote to find a place for a higher quality of life. The app will work as a matchmaking tool. Type in your preferences and push “matchmaking” and your top 10 dream village will pop up!
Benefits with My Best Village App:
1) Increases mobility to rural areas by helping people with the decision-making to move
2) Increases accessibility to rural areas by making villages visible
3) Increases connectivity by matchmaking people with rural community organizations.
Background
The idea comes from “Crowd Doing Vuollerim 2019” in a hackathon where grassroots from the villages, students, researcher professors and other experts come together to have ideas around some rural challenges. Villagers from Vuollerim, Luleå technical University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Learning Society, and others was involved these days.
Lapland Vuollerim and Vuollerim Economic Association have together with Luleå University works further on the idea with My Best Village App and it now in a start-up phase.
My Best Village was selected from 565 projects in 39 countries as a semi-finalist in The European Social Innovation Competition “Skills for Tomorrow”2021.
