Storyland Sustainability Chats: Satu Orismaa of Linnanmäki Amusement Park

Storyland’s Marie Rayner sat down for a chat with Satu Orismaa, Director, Safety and Security, Sustainability and Events at Linnanmäki Amusement Park in Helsinki, Finland. This seven-hectare, city-based amusement park was established in 1950 by six child welfare organizations and features 42 attractions. Linnanmäki has always been, and continues to be, a force for good. 

We were honoured to interview Satu to understand more about Linnanmäki, its integrated sustainability strategy, and its mission to raise funds for child welfare work.

Marie Rayner (MR): Tell me a little bit about Linnanmäki and your role. 

Satu Orismaa (SO): Linnanmäki is a longstanding amusement park in Finland, owned by Children’s Day Foundation. As a seasonal park, we are open six months of the year and during that time we serve around one million visitors. We employ 800 “Funmasters” — we are all masters of creating fun at Linnanmäki! — and through our mission we have a strong social sustainability background.  

Linnanmäki has a unique mission with social value impact going back to the park’s founding. Six child welfare organizations needed funds to support their work, and they founded Linnanmäki amusement park to raise funds for children’s welfare. Seven years later, in 1957, they founded the Children’s Day Foundation to manage [operations].  

Still today we offer free entrance to the park, free playing areas, and some free rides. Guests can bring their own food and drink to the park. We want to provide those wonderful, happy experiences to everybody. 

At the end of each season, Children’s Day Foundation donates funds to support child welfare work — which has led to €130 million donated to date. So, while our guests are having fun at Linnanmäki they are also supporting child welfare work.  

MR: You mentioned that you started working for Linnanmäki as director of sustainability in 2021. So you were already passionate about sustainability before you started? 

SO: Absolutely! I got excited about sustainability more than 15 years ago. At that time, less information was available, but that was the beginning of a learning journey.  

MR: But your passion carried you through! 

SO: To me, passion is the key; be passionate and invite others on the journey with you. [Making] businesses sustainable should be all our responsibility. It’s not just about the environment — it’s about the business being sustainable also in many other ways.  

Linnanmäki is a truly unique park with an amazing social impact. It’s been around for 74 years, and our job is to make sure it stays around for another 74 years – so it can continue to have a positive impact. And that’s really a theme in the attractions industry as a whole.  

The attractions industry creates these wonderful moments for families and friends to experience together. For example, in an amusement park like Linnanmäki, which can be considered part of cultural heritage of the city, we see generations coming back time and again to enjoy the park.  

MR: How would you describe your sustainability approach? 

SO: The great thing about Linnanmäki is that our sustainability strategy is embedded in our overall strategy. We base our sustainability on four pillars: 

• Our Funmasters: By employing Funmasters and helping young people enter working life, we seek to support them, as well as the development of working life and service culture in Finland.  

• Lots of fun: By offering joy, fun, and shared experiences to our guests from generation to generation, we seek to cherish Finnish cultural heritage. 

• Our mission: We donate funds to support the wellbeing of children and families in Finland. 

• Environment: We consider our environmental impact to ensure sustainable development.  

We have the responsibility of being an employer to 800 Funmasters. We employ people of all ages: many of them are young, and we aim to find roles that are best suited to everyone’s unique skills. Every Funmaster succeeds best when they are allowed to be themselves and use their own personality in their work. Being a Funmaster is our common service model, which everyone has their own personal way of implementing.  

We believe that the “funbeing” of our Funmasters is key to Linnanmäki’s success. We believe that by ensuring funbeing, our Funmasters are able to provide the best service to our guests. When our guests are happy, they will return. 

[So we have] Funmasters, happy customers and our mission to raise funds to support child welfare work — and enabling all this is our environmental approach. However, sustainability isn’t only about sustaining, we strive to be actively regenerative to enhance the existing journey.  

Awareness on sustainability is growing. The operating environment is changing around us, so there’s always new ways and more we can do.  

To learn, we should be listening, engaging, and gaining many different perspectives. The more dialogue we have with our guests, Funmasters, partners and other stakeholders, and the more active we are in our communities — the better we’ll be able to understand what is actually meaningful.  

It’s a constant learning journey where you are never ready. 

MR: You talk about never being ready, but it feels like Linnanmäki has done a great job of embedding its sustainability approach. Is there anything you look back on and wish you had done differently? 

SO: Originally, we thought, “Maybe we need a separate strategy for sustainability.” We took the approach we would need to design a plan, perfect it, and then launch it.   

However, very soon we realized that we needed to focus on the day-to-day things, while we also have a longer perspective on the decisions we make. Once we focused on what is truly meaningful and understood how the themes of sustainability are embedded in the core of Linnanmäki, things became much clearer.  

MR: Thinking about some of these actions and ideas, what would you say are the most important considerations for Linnanmäki when it comes to design? 

SO: Linnanmäki amusement park is in a city area surrounded by housing. We want to be a good neighbor and support the positive area development with our park design.  

A key area of focus for Linnanmäki is that we have a beautiful garden that enables recreation. Three of our seven hectares are green space. Our head gardener and visual team take care of the park’s overall theming, designing and visual comfortability: We invest a lot in plantings, and we really focus on how our rides, attractions, restaurants, shops and other services create a unique experience. We plant thousands of flowers, have a greenhouse of our own to grow perennial plants, and we have installed green roofs and bird houses that are unique and designed to match the theme of the park.  

We focus on the use of materials and one of the key features is durability — making sure what we build has a good lifespan, so that we are not wasting resources by constantly rebuilding.  

We also focus on accessibility, and we want to create a park that people feel comfortable in. This is important for our guests, but it’s also a priority to make Linnanmäki a safe, comfortable and enjoyable working environment for our Funmasters.    

MR: What do you see as the main barriers or challenges facing our industry when it comes to sustainability? 

SO: Resource scarcity and climate change are big challenges. They can have a [significant] impact on our operations and are on everyone’s radar. This is our shared planet and taking care of it is our shared responsibility. 

There are companies with years of experience, and startups with very little knowledge. To tackle the sustainability challenges, how can we bridge that gap of knowledge and best support one another? 

Luckily more and more information is available. Following this and learning from others is important. When we connect and work together, we can achieve greater impact.  

MR: Would you like to share a final piece of advice before we sign off? 

SO: Let’s be humble, keep learning and share our passion. We can always get better and it’s about understanding what our capabilities are and what is meaningful. 

When we share knowledge and insights, we come up with new ideas that lead to actions — that’s when magic happens.