For the future of children and youth
We cherish our wonderful environment and strive to create a safe, natural and equal atmosphere for children and youth to grow into an active lifestyle and to support lifelong well-being. With us, you will encounter the reliability and professionalism created by a long sports college history.
Social responsibility is at the center of Kisakallio's 70-year story
The year 1949, Finland living at the beginning of reconstruction and the rocky Karhusaari island off Porvoo. The dream of a small group of women had taken a big step forward. They had established a camp home where they could help Finnish women and girls take care of themselves and their own health through exercise and especially gymnastics. In the field of education and enlightenment, the goal of the early years was to share the good news about the health effects of exercise. The leader of the vigilant women's group was a doctor, physical education teacher and later professor Kaarina Kari. Kisakallio was born.
Kisakallio grew up under the guidance of diligent women. With the expansion of operations, Karhusaari became small, and new facilities were built in Kisakallio on the shore of Lake Lohjanjärvi. The camp expanded into a sports college and over time opened its doors to new sports and also to men. In the photos from the 1960s and 70s, the eastern neighbor's national basketball team plays and the volleyball-playing president of the coming years. After the start of the 1980s, sports education in Finland entered a new era: vocational education in sports was born. The step was also big in Kisakallio, where from the very beginning the new educational mission was implemented ambitiously and with high quality. Basketball player guests from previous decades from abroad anticipate the future, because the completion of the highway in 2009 started a new era for Kisakallio. Internationality and basketball fueled Kisakallio's enormous growth: new facilities were built, and the number of personnel tripled. At the end of the decade, internationality was visible in Kisakallio's daily life. The 2020 pandemic threw the sports college at full speed into lockdown, which silenced the entire campus for a while.
"The old Kisakallio spirit and the support of partners helped to navigate the challenges and seize new opportunities."
Kisakallio is creating close connections with partner communities in the metropolitan area and is using new means to nurture the great purpose of the Kisakallio Foundation to promote an active lifestyle, especially among children and young people.
Responsibility for the environment
The location of Kisakallio Urheiluopisto in the middle of a beautiful natural environment obliges us to purposefully strive to minimize the strain caused by our activities on our nearby nature and to help our customers enjoy the diversity of our nature in a way that appreciates it.
We strive for environmentally friendly solutions when developing our operating conditions and in our operations in general. As an educational institution and training center in the field of physical education, we make sure that environmental issues are included in our curricula and are seen as a natural part of the school's everyday life. The goal is to use our example to pass on an environmentally responsible attitude to all visitor groups of the college.
Taking responsibility for the effects of our activities on the wider environment has followed the understanding and technical advances of each era. The most significant environmental impacts are caused by our operations in the energy consumption of our large buildings, in traffic to the college and in the procurement of raw materials for our restaurant.
Union of Investments and Responsibility
In 2008, Kisakallio began a significant period of conditional investments. The plan, designed in cooperation with the city of Lohja, with strong respect for nature values, gave Kisakallio the tools for growth.
The first major environmental investment was made right after the formula was confirmed in 2008, when Kisakallio switched from oil heating to geothermal heating by sinking 12 kilometers of geothermal pipes at the bottom of Lake Lohjanjärvi on the shore of Kisakallio. At the same time, the renovated thermal power plant made our operations more efficient and heat production became significantly more environmentally friendly when, for example, 60 oil trucks a year stopped operating to Kisakallio. With the change, Kisakallio can collect more than 2000 MWh of energy from the lake in one year.
In honor of the Suomi 100 anniversary in 2017, we made a significant investment to improve traffic safety when, together with the city of Lohja, we implemented the Kisakallio bike path to increase and facilitate safe and emission-free movement between Kisakallio and Lohja.
Over the years, the lighting technology in Kisakallio has also been purposefully and extensively renewed, and the old-fashioned "light bulbs" have been switched to more environmentally friendly LED technology, e.g. in all large sports halls. At the same time, the lighting control systems have been renewed so that they now operate based on space reservations, rather than lighting the spaces from early morning until late at night.
In the summer of 2020, we updated the ice rink with a more environmentally friendly freezing technology that uses carbon dioxide as a cooling agent. The second part of the ice hall's refrigeration technology changes started in the summer of 2021 when the construction of our solar power plant started. In the future, the goal of the solar power plant is to produce up to 80 percent of the energy required by the ice rink.
In 2022, we have started a systematic mapping work on the successes of bearing environmental responsibility and the next development steps to choose from. As in the core of our social mission, in sports and physical activity and training professionals, we also plan, implement and evaluate our activities and their effects in bearing environmental responsibility. We strive to report the progress of the work and its challenges honestly and openly.