Research

Scientific Research

As we state in our purpose, we wish to seek answers to questions about social justice, regenerative solutions and existential dilemmas that are hard to answer within the confining frames of conventional academic and religious traditions. Therefore we collaborate with various academic and spiritual institutions in order to answer these questions and raise new ones.

Collaborators:

AAU projects on regenerative tourism

We have had the honor of researching with two groups from Aalborg University who have just defended their projects in the beginning of this year. One group has created the Yggdrasil Elemental Program which will be launched in spring, and the other group has created our crowdfunding strategy which will be launched as soon as we get a green light for building the facilities. We have taught both groups the regenerative values of Yggdrasil which permeates everything we do and is therefore also incorporated into the scientific research.

Creation of an Educational Volunteer Program

by Ada Myllyoja, Faria Naznin & Estelle Raffin

This project is produced in collaboration with Yggdrasil Sanctuary, a holistic retreat centre located in Stevns Klint, Denmark. Being a new organisation that is still in its early stages, Yggdrasil Sanctuary provided us – a group of three students from Aalborg University Copenhagen – an assignment that could have a remarkable impact regarding the sanctuary’s development. In order to deliver this assignment, we have divided our project in two pieces: this paper, which discusses and analyses the background and the process of the assignment, and the final product, which is available in Appendix A.

Yggdrasil Sanctuary had a strong vision of their own educational volunteer program, which they wanted us to help design. The program in question would work as a means to not only decrease the costs of employment, but also to create the sanctuary its own community and to educate the volunteers in regenerative methods and holistic approaches the sanctuary stands for.

In addition to the educational volunteer program, Yggdrasil Sanctuary expressed their interest in developing their very own membership program. While our focus was to construct the volunteer program, we considered the membership program to support the ultimate goal of creating a sense of community to the sanctuary. Thus, we decided to include the concept of membership as a part of our final product.

Constructing the ‘theoretical background’ for this project we investigate the concepts of spirituality and Nordic animism, as well as the theory of sense of community. These concepts help us to position the project with the values Yggdrasil Sanctuary promotes, and they provide us a framework for designing a volunteer program that enhances the sense of community within the organisation.

In regard to data collection we rely on desk research, reviewing literature and in-depth discussions with the founders of the organisation. The goal of our desk research was to become both inspired and knowledgeable about other volunteering programs, as well as to investigate potential places to advertise Yggdrasil Sanctuary’s program.

The ‘background’ chapter of this paper explores the need for a volunteer program and reflects upon the topic of volunteerism, including critical viewpoints discussed by other scholars. In order to critically assess the program, we created, we conducted a SWOT analysis including limitations of our results. Finally, we elaborate and reflect the development of this project in ‘project design’, and present the material for our final presentation to Yggdrasil Sanctuary in ‘material for the presentation’.

Regenerative tourism and crowdfunding

By Nisha Khanal & Munnuka Rai

The ‘Yggdrasil Sanctuary’ project is a semester project that is a part of course requirement for the semester. It started with a project fair and students getting an opportunity to collaborate with a company. This project started with the collaboration with Yggdrasil Sanctuary which is a retreat center that dreams of creating a regenerative, holistic, and educational place for contemplation and creativity. The Sanctuary is located near the UNESCO-protected site along the Scandinavian coastline, a relaxing environment brimming with wildlife that connects the elements of earth, water, fire, and air. The primary goal of Yggdrasil Sanctuary is to pave a way towards a sustainable future for the tourism industry by taking a regenerative approach and engage the neighborhood and give back in a way that benefits the neighborhood while targeting to draw business travelers to their sanctuary so they can conduct transactions with various Danish and foreign corporations.

The primary issue raised by the company at the project fair was the scarcity of funds they had to launch their business. The concept of crowdfunding was brought up and the problem of how to use crowdfunding for fundraising was significant. Different marketing tactics were explored along with crowdfunding considering effective marketing strategies were important for both crowdfunding and company. Hence the main focus of this project was to present ideas of marketing strategies for the operation of the business. Primary data’s were collected in a form of online questionnaire in December to get the general idea about the possible consumers for the sanctuary.

Theoretical part has also been used to better understand the approach of regeneration and three pillars of sustainability. And lastly the project design is made to reflect the step by step process of making the product.