About us

Women On Wednesday was founded in 2012 as a non profit organization and started out as a meeting place to build relationships between migrants and local Swedish women.

Over the years the organisation’s focus on problem-solving and presentation of facts, has developed WOW into a platform where women from different backgrounds, ages, socioeconomic status, religions and geographical areas, together with donors and partners promote professional and social inclusion.

Our History

Linda Törner is the founder of WOW and, today, an expert in integration in Sweden.

Linda was brought up in Sweden and did high school in Amsterdam. She has a degree in Chemical Engineering as well as Economics and started her career at Sappi in Brussels followed by Hewlett-Packard in Stuttgart. After having had children she left the high-tech industries to focus on her own initiatives on integration. It was the experience of the unexpected segregation she found when moving to Halmstad from Stuttgart which led her to start WOW.

As a mother she never met other mothers and children who were foreigners in the many activities she took her own children to. This got her to start thinking about the effects this must has both on an individual and community level. When she looked up women who had immigrated to Sweden from other countries, who lived in a socioeconomic weak area, she learnt that these women did not know that the kind of activities that she was taking her children to even existed, and when she told them about all the different things children can do, the mother’s first assumption was that it must be very expensive. Why did they not know about the great variety of activities that there is for mothers and children in their own city? The answer to that question was that they did not know a single local native speaker.

Linda wanted to introduce local native speakers with newcomers from all over the globe as she strongly believed that friendships, understanding and common goals would be a necessary start for a society without segregation.

The results of WOW speak for themselves, and Linda’s drive to change things that do not work and find new solutions has made a difference in many lives and given inspiration to as well locals as immigrants, men and women to act and contribute to a better, more inclusive society.