Related Issue
Fall 2025
Business & Entrepreneurship
Warm Welcome
Helping immigrants integrate into a small Finnish town
By Samantha Drake / Fall 2025
September 18th, 2025
PHOTO: Matti Pyykkö/Akinori Ikeda Photography
When Granger Simmons ’05 and his family moved to a small city in southwest Finland called Uusikaupunki in 2012, he was unprepared for cold winters with temperatures averaging around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. He was even less prepared for some locals’ frosty reception.
Simmons, who concentrated in linguistic anthropology at Brown, soon discovered the Finnish language has no word for “please” and that some older Finns aren’t necessarily grateful for a helping hand. Seeing a woman struggling to hold her groceries while trying to open the door to their apartment building, Simmons naturally moved to assist her. “I opened the door for her and she got angry. I mean, livid,” he recalls. “She told me in Finnish to go ahead and that she can handle herself.”
Simmons was stunned. Growing up in the Philadelphia foster care system, he’d had strong relationships with the older people in his life. “Everybody was my mom. Everybody was my uncle. Everybody was my aunt and grandma,” he says.
Simmons and his YouTube cohost Oliver Briny get goofy on set.PHOTO: Syötävän Hyvää/Akinori Ikeda Photography
Today, as Uusikaupunki’s first non-Finnish city councilman, Simmons helps immigrants from the Middle East, India, Africa, and Europe adapt to life in the once-homogeneous city.
Simmons and his wife, Odetta Lee-Simmons ’06, who is half Finnish, met at Brown after Lee-Simmons, a psychology concentrator, heard Simmons belting out the Whitney Houston song “I Will Always Love You” in a men’s bathroom shower in the Poland Square dorm one morning. The couple now has four sons ranging in age from 5 to 14.
On relocating to Uusikaupunki, Simmons took a job teaching English, where a class of older Finns eager to learn the language soon dispelled his initially negative impressions of older locals. “These people embraced me, oh, my goodness,” he says. Simmons went on to launch several businesses, including product development firm Simmons Food & Beverage and the Pink Vanilla American Bakery.
Uusikaupunki experienced an unprecedented surge of immigrants starting in 2015, drawn to increasing work opportunities in the region, particularly at the city’s Mercedes-Benz manufacturing plant. Uusikaupunki’s population grew from approximately 13,000 in 2015 to more than 15,000 in 2018, says Simmons. Recently re-elected to a second four-year term as a city councilman, Simmons is committed to building the infrastructure needed to help immigrants in the region navigate Finnish daily life and government systems. He hopes to develop a model private and public sector support system for immigrants that can be reproduced throughout Finland.
Meanwhile, Simmons brings people together through food. He launched an ongoing multicultural reality show on YouTube called Still Edible, in which university students compete to develop innovative food products from industrial food waste. He also created a multicultural food market for Finns and immigrants to share their cuisines—now an annual event.
The food market proved the turning point. “It was the first time I heard and saw Finnish people speaking with foreign people,” he says. “I heard Spanish. I heard French, I heard Italian, I heard German. And I thought, ‘Now I’m home.’”
