Vantaa's good practices and successes regarding integration have aroused nationwide interest

The goal is to, in the future, even more systematically develop the service operations in Vantaa, as well as to share efficient operating models with other municipalities. Data collection of good practices will be implemented with the help of a project. Vantaa has already for a long time refined, for example, partnering with essential immigrant stakeholders. This kind of activity is key to the success of integration.

Vantaa has been building trust and creating good practices for a long time, which has aroused interest in other municipalities, as well. Vantaa has been building trust and creating good practices for a long time, which has aroused interest in other municipalities, as well. Effective and good examples of Vantaa’s social innovations consist of, among others, Vantaan Tsemppari (working-life coaching), Tempo Orchestra, and the Vanhemmat mukaan (Parents along to school and working life) project.  

Creating an immigration and integration roadmap

According to Säde Tahvanainen, who promoted the good integration practices project, the need for creating a roadmap was recognized when other municipalities showed interest in learning about Vantaa's operating models. Collecting good integration practices will be conducted by project-like activities whose preparation began last fall (fall 2024) as promoting an appropriation for acquiring additional personnel resources.

Project specialist Jenni Tahvanainen is the key person of the project set up for collecting Vantaa's good integration practices. Tahvanainen has a solid background in Vantaa’s integration service expertise.

Jenni Tahvanainen has already begun the work to collect good integration practices. She will carry out an investigation whose results will be turned into the immigration and integration roadmap. This roadmap will collect operating models mirroring Vantaa’s successes, as well as the critical issues that indicate the kind of activities that can result in effective results.

According to Säde Tahvanainen, launching the project was the starting pistol to developing immigration activities in Vantaa. “We have not completed this matter, and that is fine, because our goal is to next ponder on the myriad issues together with the city’s decisionmakers,” Säde concludes.

The investigation can show the effectiveness of activities and promote a culture of joint discussion between decisionmakers

Säde Tahvanainen emphasizes that widely telling about Vantaa's good and efficient integration practices has been deemed important also among the political decisionmakers. Cooperation with Vantaa City Council has been significant. “When we have discussed cooperation with the city council, we have come up with the question of how the city's goals can be furthered and how to consider solutions,” Tahvanainen says.

Exact data is also required for decision-making, when we are analyzing the effectiveness of the operating budget of all our integration activities. “We will first create an extensive data base of our activities, and the data base will help us view the activities on the decision-making level. Only then can we further improve our service operations,” Tahvanainen says.

Furthermore, according to Tahvanainen, a lot of wishes and measures (particularly as regards targeting of financing) are constantly being directed to integration activities. Therefore, we wish to thoroughly understand and show—through a functional inspection—what kind of overall effectiveness integration activities and city council decisions have had on promoting integration in Vantaa.

”When our arguments and activities to promote integration activities are based on facts, we can act more flexibly,” Tahvanainen sums up.

According to Tahvanainen, discussions on promoting integration will continue with the new city council. Tahvanainen adds that this discussion is of the utmost importance from the perspective of promoting the city’s integration service activities. “We have achieved many good things here in Vantaa and gained more financing for them. The next major step is to get to see how they have affected the municipality as a whole,” Tahvanainen comments.

The issues that the project collects are meant to be used by Vantaa Employment and Business Development Division multiple times. Tahvanainen tells that joint discussion plays a key role in including and obliging the City of Vantaa’s decisionmakers in shared activities.

Where has Vantaa been especially successful and managed to achieve effective activities?

Säde Tahvanainen says that Vantaa has created an overall image of the good integration practices that have also gained public interest. “We are able to rapidly and flexibly change our course and seek new methods and ways. This skill of ours is of special interest to other municipalities, as well,” she states.

The City of Vantaa has already for several years developed partnering with the foreign-language associations, organizations, and religious communities situated in the municipality. According to Tahvanainen, one of Vantaa’s key strengths is to see members of the municipality as active actors instead of a mere target group.

“We regard foreign-language-speaking residents that have moved to Vantaa as active actors partnering with the city. With this inclusive way of thinking, we wish to continuously lower the threshold of all Vantaa residents to use official services,” Tahvanainen says.

Furthermore, other media have recently started to highlight Vantaa’ activities. One of our success stories as regards interconnecting different kinds of activities is the one of immigrant mothers who participated in basic-education lessons and learned Finnish that way.

Interest in Vantaa has also been aroused by interconnecting various integration services, as well as our flexible development work.  Vantaa has succeeded in meeting the impressive immigration challenges, especially when accounting for the great number of immigrants compared to the municipality's overall population.

When pondering on service development and enabling future success stories, one must take into consideration the overall picture of the myriad integration services. Luckily, Vantaa is very dedicated to sharing its successes and effective practices to help other communities in their chores.