Clarification plant wins sustainability award

The founders have either experienced discrimination themselves or in their environment. Their platform aims to make society freer from prejudice and discrimination.

The Karlsruhe start-up Aufklärwerk has won the Sustainability Award of the "Grow Start-up Competition". This is aimed at start-ups in the Karlsruhe region and brings with it prize money of 6,000 euros.

Aufklärwerk wants to make society freer from prejudice and discrimination. The start-up offers a central platform for social organizations. It serves to mediate social education and meeting offers, including, for example, lectures, workshops or guided tours. For now, the platform is focusing on schools and other educational institutions. According to the founders, the reason for this is that children and young people are a particularly sensitive target group that needs to be educated preventively in order to create a sustainable reduction in prejudice and discrimination.

"We are both burning for the idea, as we have both already experienced discrimination or prejudice several times either directly or in our immediate environment and come into contact with it regularly through our social commitment," explains Felix Xiong, who is studying business informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He and his co-founder Johannes Kurz, a master's student in technology entrepreneurship at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, got to know each other in the innovation team of the university group "Enactus KIT." "We quickly agreed that we wanted to address the issue of prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination, as this is a major, omnipresent social problem in Germany," Xiong recalls. Xiong takes on the role of technical project manager and Kurz that of business project manager.

In the meantime, Aufklärwerk is a team of nine people. The start-up has celebrated other successes in addition to the prize: "We have already been able to win over the first bids and organizations," says Xiong. "In addition, we are already being supported by KSC and Volkswohnung GmbH through the 'Der KSC tut gut.' initiative, and we were also able to win our first business partner, i.e., sponsors and supporters from the business community."

They recently went live with the platform and plan to continuously develop it further. In the future, Aufklärwerk wants to further expand networking and become better known.