Behind
The GoodMess
The GoodMess was founded in December 2024 by our CEO Dr Tiina Vaittinen. After 17 years in the academia, Tiina felt the need to do something different and take her research-based knowledge and skills closer to practice. This “something” ended up being a career transition out of the university, and the founding of The GoodMess.
With two degrees in International Politics, a minor in Social Anthropology, a PhD in Peace and Conflict Research, plus a thoroughly multi-disciplinary postdoctoral research career, Tiina is a versatile specialist.
Her vast international networks extend from the academia to praxis to policymaking to industry to arts. This means that, while The GoodMess may seem like a one-woman show, it is not just that. Through different kinds of partnerships and collaborations, we have the capacity for bigger projects, too.
Having built most of her academic career on highly competitive project funding, Tiina is an experienced fundraiser, grant writer and project leader — with a tip or two in her sleeve on how to turn small resources into big results.
For instance, in her most recent project, Tiina developed — together with her team and various stakeholders — a model that could help reduce the environmental burden of single-use adult incontinence pads across societies. This model has been well received internationally among different stakeholders. It could be applied to other care technologies, too, helping us to fit our material care needs within planetary boundaries.
Tiina is also an expert on questions of international nurse migration and political economies and ethics of old age care, and holds a research affiliation with the WHO Collaboration Centre on Health in All Policies and Social Determinants of Health at the University of Tampere. You can find out more about Tiina’s work at Google Scholar, Academia.edu, or LinkedIn.
Our purpose and philosophy
Our work is motivated by the need to build a world where the material needs of care of all — and not just those with able bodies — can be met without harming the planet, or other people.
This is a massive challenge — and one that many sustainability initiatives still omit.
Drawing on academic work, we have developed methodologies to map the planetary political economies of care, from the micro-level of intimate everyday encounters all the way to the global structures and transnational finance.
Our work is informed by an ethics of needs. For us, care needs are just not something passive to be acted upon. Care needs have agency: they make the world go round.
From this perspective, any human activity — any business, any policy — may be understood as serving someone’s care needs. Often, this happens at the cost of the needs of others.
Presently, the care needs of the globally wealthy override the care needs of other people, as well as the needs of the planet. This threatens the liveability of the planet, and hence the survival of the human species.
This competition over whose care needs matter is not a zero-sum game, however. Quite the opposite. It is a complex, beautiful mess, where the human and non-human needs of care inteweave with one another, endlessly.
It is up to us to make this weaving sustainable and liveable, for all. And we have to find ways of doing it ethically, in ways that is just and equitable, accounting for the needs of all.
This is a complex problem, but not impossible to solve. Driving the change is our purpose and mission.
