Guest blog by Sari Della Spina, Anniina Enovaara, Marjut Kauppinen, Marjaana Risku
Helsinki is, on the scale of Finland, a city of its own, with challenges typical to itself. The number of residents who speak foreign languages is one of Helsinki’s new characteristic phenomena. Services are taking shape to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse customer base. Children and young people’s sense of security and well-being are challenged by many things. The root causes of the problems have been formed over a long period of time and stem from many changes in society and living styles. The challenges in the lives of children and young people with immigrant backgrounds and foreign languages are manifold due to the implementation of language skills and cultural differences.
One of the first tasks of the training was the collection of information from different perspectives about the observed phenomena in our own urban development area that challenge the sense of security of children and young people. We used this knowledge base when outlining and concretizing our main problem, the components affecting it and their motivations. While doing this problem building work, we learned to use the fishbone diagram. With the model, we were able to look at our problem from several angles and look for as many influencing factors as possible.
The main theme of the training was the challenges in parenting, and fathers, who are missing from the lives of children and young people based on our data collection, came under special scrutiny. In immigrant families, mothers often independently take care of the children’s everyday life and possible connections to kindergartens and schools. The importance of fathers and trusted men in families – the father figure – is often left aside when looking at the situations of mothers and children and defining measures. Based on our observations, the mother is most often contacted in the services regarding children’s matters.
We learned new ways of understanding the underlying factors and interdependencies of complex problems. We received tools and ideas on how it might be possible to promote change towards more functional processes. For example, we understood that it is meaningful to look for existing good and functional ways of working and go with the people who are working to think about how they could further strengthen the successful ways of working and give up the non-functioning ones. The training offered an incentive to build new connections between different actors. It offered methods to find support for change proposals, so that the perceived grievances could be corrected in the future.
In this age of the world, we wrestle with numerous complex challenges, and a single actor cannot solve them. Collaboration must be done across administrative boundaries, open-mindedly and flexibly utilizing everyone’s expertise. The operators of the NGO have a wealth of irreplaceably valuable know-how, which should be utilized more effectively than at present. With the combination of information and activities of different parties, both the city’s employees and above all the residents would get the best possible support for their situations.
The utilization of resident participation and local strengths, the importance of urban spaces in strengthening community and safety, and the connections between different actors took a significant position in our evaluation. We also recognized that the city organization is multi-level, so confirmation of goals and measures must be sought and found especially from the decision makers.
The very core of the work to strengthen safety lies in community. After the breakdown of traditional community structures, it has been realized that strengthening community spirit requires multi-stakeholder cooperation and quite new thinking in, for example, urban planning. Studies have found that resilient communities support and offer support and stability to their members even during crises.
The development of multiculturalism creates dangers for the emergence of different shadow communities if we do not ensure that we have the necessary means to offer every resident the opportunity to find a suitable connection to the dominant culture, to become part of the community and the support it offers. We are already a long way in the work of building a prosperous and safe city if we strengthen trust among people as well as in the relevance and agency of individuals through cooperation between different actors and the conscious construction of prosperous communities. However, this cannot be achieved by setting the goal of a prosperous and safe city. The goal should be to strengthen working practices and small experiments to find more effective ways in a continuous dialogue between service users and employees.
We consider the following valuable lessons from the training in particular:
1. Dare to try new ways of doing things,
2. Evaluate what was done, what worked, what didn’t, i.e. what was learned and
3. What will be done next, i.e. what will be tried next.
Developing work and goals through learning, systematically taking small steps in everyday life, is the most effective way to bring about change, together.
Talking about this topic to different listeners has worked surprisingly effectively. Describing the topic, even if a little cautiously at first, has developed our ability to build a story that touches the listener in a way that suits them. With the story’s help, we have found small measures, by taking which we have found opportunities to get small gains at work. We have not imagined ourselves to be experts in everything. Since our problem is complex skein, we have accepted even thin threads as a starting point for action.
This blog was written by participants who completed a 12-week PDIA for Child and Youth Safety in Helsinki online action-learning program from March – June 2024. 24 participants successfully completed this program.