A unique experience that not only allows you to get to know yourself and the world around you better, but also to understand people who have to live without one essential sense – sight. This is how one could summarise the journey into darkness offered by the social enterprise “Neredzamā Pasaule”. It is an experience that breaks stereotypes and changes thinking.

The museum’s founder, Maksims Mihejevs, came up with the idea quite by accident. In 2016, when he went to Moscow to support the Latvian national team at the World Ice Hockey Championships, he walked into a museum of this kind that was located in a shopping mall. “I was shocked! There are a lot of myths about visually impaired people, but here I learned, I experienced, that blind people can even be airplane pilots, programmers, architects, that they travel, they do sports. That was a big stereotype-breaker for me. I walked out of this museum and I thought – we sighted people often complain a lot, even though our problems are small. There is so much that visually impaired people can do here – things that even many sighted people cannot do! It convinced me that maybe all our obstacles are just in our heads, everything can be achieved.”

This conviction remained, and a few years later Maksims was encouraged to try. He found out what social entrepreneurship was, researched everything there was to know about the idea of such a museum. It turned out to come from Germany, where it is very popular. They also found similar museums in St Petersburg and Kijiv and managed to build good relationships with their managers to discuss the business idea and get advice or recommendations.

“Since I was a child, I’ve loved both helping people and discovering interesting things about them. And I like the idea that through entertainment you can show people serious things. That people not only get unique, vivid, unforgetable emotions from this interactive tour, but they become more empathetic, they think about diversity, that people are capable of anything, that they can adapt and not only survive, but really enjoy life,” says Maksims Mihejevs.

He founded the company, received his first Altum grant and, despite the covid pandemic time, “Neredzamā Pasaule” is now in its fifth year. During this time, he has received several more grants, various awards and, most importantly, encouraging reviews from all visitors. “It was such a turning point in life for me personally, and it has all gone well. It is my first business experience and, of course, we all learn from our mistakes, but it is good that I dared and actually opened this place,” says the entrepreneur.

Although he is visually impaired – he has been blind in one eye since birth – he has had no previous exposure to the world of the blind. “My parents brought me up as a normal child, without taking this disability into account. The only difference is that every year I had to go to the doctor to have my eyes checked. In the last years of school I had to change my glasses, and he said, ‘You can buy those glasses with your disability pension. How, please? What disability? It was a great miracle for us – for me and also for my mother. Yes, I knew that I had to protect my health, I had to protect my eye, but I didn’t have any big restrictions in that respect. Although nobody guaranteed me that the disease would not develop in the other eye. Thank God, everything is fine, it did not develop. But somewhere in my subconscious I was afraid that I might become blind. So, I guess you could say I’m still involved, even though I wasn’t in the blind community until this business,” says Maksims.

He only found out about the Latvian Society of the Blind when he was looking for staff. He started working with the society, and 14 people responded to the first job advertisement. Almost half of them had received a special training on how to lead a group, how to keep people’s attention, etc. Finding people to work is not a big problem – there are about 12 000 visually impaired or partially sighted people in Latvia, most of whom do not have a job. So, there is internal competition, but those who have got a job usually don’t want to lose it.

The company currently employs four people. The main selection principle is that the employee must be responsible and can be relied on, and must be willing to work and learn. In addition to Latvian, you also need to speak Russian at least at a conversational level; English is an advantage.

It is not easy to compete with other entertainment offers. “Like everyone else, you have to compete and find your place,” says Maksims, adding that he can’t complain about the attendance and the interest of the people. The museum is now also part of the Latvian cultural programme for schools, so pupils come in relatively large numbers. Companies organise team building events here.

The impact and contribution to society is easy to measure – just read the feedback from visitors. “They say it’s a great stereotype-breaker, they become more empathetic, they understand the problems of blind people better. Even some parents of blind people say afterwards – now we can understand much better how our child feels. I really like the way the schools are responding – the pupils understand not only how visually impaired people feel, but how anyone with mental or physical health problems feels. That makes me really happy,” says Maksims Mihejevs.