Contextual aspects

The number of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) is a growing social problem in Finland, as it is all over the EU. The topic is openly discussed in Finland and the government has underlined the importance of tackling youth marginalisation. It has pinpointed especially education and guarantees a study place in a secondary school to all young people, who have completed comprehensive school. In addition, actions have been undertaken to provide more equal opportunities to education and more smooth transition from one education level and form to another. Moreover, guidance, social, health, employment and youth services have been gathered together under one roof (‘Ohjaamo’). Multi-professional action, cross-sectoral ecosystem thinking, and cooperation between officials and NGOs in pre-emptive procedures are all seen as good examples to reduce youth marginalisation. Also co-creation has been quite advanced in some earlier service development projects and already informs various initiatives for disadvantaged young people. On the less positive side, this ‘projectification’ makes the service sector sometimes quite difficult to understand; even to professionals, not to mention young people. It also makes the field fragmentary and discontinuous, although building the trust takes time and young people especially are in need of consistency.

Yet these efforts are still insufficient as still many youth struggle with unemployment, lack of education, mental health problems, lack of hobbies, bullying, inability to act, and loneliness (National Health Survey of pupils in primary and secondary schools, Halme et. al. 2018). It is clear that the current service system does not match their needs. Moreover, there is a lack of efficient ways to reach marginalised young people and the voice of marginalised youth is not heard enough in the society.

The CoSIE pilot was initiated in Turku, Finland, a city that has compiled an Action Plan Against Youth Marginalisation and approved by the City Council in 29.1.2019. The Action Plan, recognized a need for further analysis about which of the many measures work and which do not and why. In it encouraged actions to better understand the youth marginalisation process.

Drivers and brakes

• The political support through the Action Plan
• plenty of good ideas and concepts from the hackathons. The ideas were for example related to new kind of meeting points, socially encouraging games, mobile apps about services with augmented reality, mentors and peer support. The city of Turku originally promised to implement some ideas created in Hackathons.
• Driving researchers and NGOs: Turku University of Applied Sciences took responsibility of implementing one of the ideas: a training about how to encounter a young person as a customer. The course was developed in cooperation with TUAS lecturer and students and a NGO called ‘Kaupunkilähetys’ and its youths’ development panel.
• Management support .The structure of the city means that we should get on board the managers of different sectors, most importantly from the social services and youth services. This has not been the case. Our contact persons work in the central governance, and they do not have enough power to get our ideas through to the managers.
• Administrative silos. Moreover, the different sectors tend to work in silos, and it is not easy to get them to work together.

After discussions with the city officials, it was decided to arrange a service design workshop to frontline workers from different sector in Turku and NGOs, aiming to find ways to implement the embedded customer value in the concepts created in Hackathons. The workshop lasted two days and it was held in December 2019. Participants were from outreach youth work, social work for adults and social work for families, family counselling centre and one NGO.