Infinity Mannheim- Elevate Social Entrepreneurship

Infinity Mannheim e.V. is a student organization aimed at the examination of various approaches to shaping a sustainable future for our society. The central question for us is how companies can contribute to sustainable solutions to current and future challenges.

We expect sustainable solutions to take into account social, ecological and economic demands.

By organizing talks and workshops with representatives from the economy, science and society, but also by implementing own project, we offer a holistic way of viewing different approaches and create space for reflection for the students of the University of Mannheim. Thanks to our multidimensional approach, the newly acquired knowledge from talks and workshops can easily be applied to real-world scenarios in our projects.

We want to establish a student organization at the University of Mannheim that puts sustainability first. We have noticed that the university promotes social entrepreneurship only to a very small extent, despite the fact that it is an area where students can easily get active themselves, e.g. in founding start-ups. We want to offer the opportunity for hands-on application of acquired knowledge from university in combination with creative own ideas.

Holistic Education

We see ourselves as a think-tank that aims at promoting awareness and skills to shape sustainable solutions for our society. The goal of our philosophy is to offer practically oriented training in addition to our theoretical studies. That is why we organize internal workshops on interdisciplinary topics such as Design Thinking and Project Management.

Our Impact

The name says it all: infinity. We want to create sustainable solutions at our university in such a way that they stay, even when we are not around anymore. After all, sustainability is not only the responsibility of politics and the economy, it concerns us all. With out projects, we want to show that sustainability is not boring, but offers benefits to all of us.
MaBottle – Drink clean

The goal of this project is to introduce stylish reusable bottles as an alternative to conventional plastic bottles in order to reduce plastic waste and to show that our tap water is not only drinkable, but applies to high quality standards. The profits from the sales of the bottles will be invested in building the necessary infrastructure for water fountains at the University of Mannheim.

KeepCups – Drink it, keep it!

Every year, 6.4 bn paper cups are thrown away after having been used for only a few minutes. With your help, we are going to introduce reusable KeepCups at the University of Mannheim to reduce the usage of paper cups on campus. In a joint project of several student organizations, we are currently working on making coffee consumption at our university more sustainable. Our goal is to reduce paper cups and offer the students a reusable alternative, such as KeepCups or insulated cups.

Shea Butter – protect your skin, protect your planet

“Balmyou” is a young company that produces fair-trade shea butter in Uganda in a 100% ecological way that will be sold on the German market. With our student expertise, we support the founders of the start-up in the creation of a sustainability concept, in the planning and implementation of a crowdfunding campaign and in the design of marketing activities.

Our student organization is not a marketing platform for corporations and companies. Only true stories about courageous and future-oriented entrepreneurs and change-makers are brought to our auditoriums. That is why we do not receive large funding from sponsors, but that’s okay. What is more important to us is focusing on our area of interest: sustainability.

We prove that sustainability does not mean sacrifice.

Our products are sustainable, as are our processes. To give some examples: for our flyers, we only use recycled papers, and at our events, we always serve food that has been saved from being thrown away. That’s great for our stomach, conscience – and wallet! This way, we can invest your financial support in even more useful ways.

We establish sustainability as lifestyle

With your help, we want to create more appealing products and concepts because we are convinced that sustainability is not a short-lived trend, but a way of life.

Because of you, we can work on our projects as the first student organization of the University of Mannheim to be financed by crowdfunding.

In the past, we have already been able to realize several events that looked at sustainability from different angles: among others, we organized a panel discussion with representatives of the UN and ONE, a workshop with glore, the leading online store for sustainable fashion, and a talk with the rebellious start-up einhorn condoms.

We are going to launch a campaign addressing the wastage of resources – “MaBottle” and “Drink it, keep it” are the related projects. Vaude and Premium Cola are two companies that will be coming to Mannheim to tell us about their approaches.
Costs that we will have to cover include:
• organizational costs (remuneration and travel expenses for speakers, rental cost for the auditorium, …)
• project costs (PR, ordering prototypes, printing cost, …)
• equipment (rental cost for furniture, technical equipment, …)