| Representative |
Yuki Kuwahara
In response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, he founded a business in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture in 2013. After working on developing furniture made from domestic cedar, he commercialized participatory renovation, which allows people to enjoy "creating together." In 2018, he established a foundation and expanded nationwide. In 2022, he transferred his participatory renovation business. From his experience in the field as a corporation and a foundation, he felt the need to visualize the social impact of his business, and began developing an impact management tool called "Purpose Board." In February 2023, he founded &PUBLIC Co., Ltd. with the concept of "Let's innovate the power of the public together." |
| Main Achievements |
Participate in the ICT Startup League in 2024 |
| Childhood Dream |
When he was a baseball boy in elementary school, his dream was to become a professional baseball player. As he grew older, his desire changed to wanting to work in international cooperation. During his university days, he happened to come across a book in the library called "Muhammad Yunus Autobiography: A Banker Aiming for a World Without Poverty," and this is what has inspired him to this day. |
| Influential People, Things, and Events |
People: Tsugunosuke Kawai, Muhammad Yunus, and Satish Kumar.
Things: Airplanes.
Events: "After the Great East Japan Earthquake, I had many opportunities to meet practitioners from all over the country who were rooted in their local communities and engaged in trial and error, and I feel that the diverse ways of thinking and values I was exposed to there have shaped who I am today." |
| Motivation, Goals, and Ideal World |
What &PUBLIC aims to do is to "update the local government OS." Specifically, we want to raise awareness of self-governance and change the flow of money to a results-oriented approach. The policy-making process in the 1,741 local governments across the country is now becoming extremely sophisticated and complex, with issues such as "diversifying local issues," "difficulty in increasing the number of employees," "financial crises due to social security costs," and "demanded accountability." On the other hand, local governments' annual expenditures are about 100 trillion yen. They are also stakeholders with enormous influence, equivalent to 10% of GDP. As a method to achieve a shift to results-oriented approach, a public-private collaboration method called "Social Impact Bonds (SIBs)" has already been promoted, but SIBs have not been widely adopted in Japan due to the large cost of business construction due to the large number of stakeholders such as evaluation agencies, the difficulty of securing businesses that can solve social issues, and the difficulty of setting performance indicators. That is why we will develop and utilize impact management tools to reduce indirect costs to the minimum and implement a system in society that allows citizens to participate in solving local issues with small investments. Riding the growing trend for social impact disclosure both domestically and internationally, we aim to make it possible to utilize the knowledge of various social issues from all over the country that is accumulated in the tool in the field of government policies that support our lives. We want to realize a social infrastructure that is co-created by impact-oriented governments with high problem-solving capabilities and citizens with a sense of self-governance, so that we can proudly pass the baton to the children of the future. |
