Youth Work in Finland: Finding Ways for Intercultural Opening

As a part of public youth services, youth work activities should be equally open for every young individual living in Finland. As one of the spheres for young people’s peer contacts, it may ideally provide an arena for increased contacts with young people with different (ethnic) backgrounds and possibilities for educational purposes, such as advancing tolerance and anti-racism and encouraging encounters and friendships across cultural and ethnic boundaries.

A previous study (Harinen 2005) has shown that youth work activities are important especially for those young people with migrant background, who have arrived in Finland rather recently. In this sense, youth work activities are far from being insignificant for the intercultural opening of the Finnish society as a whole. It is therefore of great importance to examine the degree the youth work system as an institution is capable of opening up culturally in order to allow young people with different backgrounds to enter it and to provide them services that suit their needs.