Video details:
Soft music plays and, on a violet background, the English title appears. There’s no easy solutions for difficult questions.
Sini Perho sits in a room with a glass door behind her. She wears a light green shirt, has short reddish hair, and glasses. In the top right corner appears the Peace Education Institute logo, consisting of the white letters RKI. At the bottom of the screen, text shows her name, job title Senior Planning Officer, and her organization City of Helsinki, Culture and Leisure, Youth Work.
Sini Perho begins to speak.
During the trip, something I partly already knew was reinforced. There are no easy solutions to difficult questions and challenges. You have to be patient and try to find quite complex solutions. These themes are challenging and sensitive, and we all come to these situations from different starting points.
I’ve hopefully gained more confidence that these matters and these dialogical methods can indeed be learned. It’s a long road, but there are also concrete tools for those challenges. It’s worth practicing them together with more experienced colleagues.
Music plays, and, on a violet background, a mid-title appears. Building Safer Spaces.
Sini Perho continues to speak.
The expertise of the Peace Education Institute also influences how such a study trip is organized—what kind of visit it becomes and what supports the participants’ learning.
For example, in Stockholm we had people working in quite different fields. At the start we had a facilitated discussion about our expectations: which themes of the visit interested us, what we thought about them, and what we wanted to know.
Looking back, I think without that discussion we would have gotten much less out of what we heard from the people we met. I believe it created a safe space for learning. If someone was worried about speaking English, we practiced helping each other in a low-threshold way. All of that naturally supported us, because the space was made as safe as possible for learning.
In my opinion all these things affect what you can learn and what you can bring back into your own work. It created an atmosphere of encouragement naturally.
Everyone probably takes different things from such a trip, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s worth reflecting on your own work and sharing what you hope to gain. By sharing, others also hear about your work. This way we were able to learn from each other’s work as well as from the people we met.
Music plays and, on a violet background, a mid-title appears. It’s important to learn from others.
Sini Perho continues to speak.
It’s important to know what is happening elsewhere. Especially in a city the size of Helsinki, we don’t have many other Finnish cities facing similar phenomena first. It’s really important to hear from Stockholm and even further away what kinds of solutions and experiments exist and what works.
Of course, it’s always very interesting to hear directly from the people themselves and to see on site the places and realities where the work is done.
We learned about work related to youth groups, gangs, and violence. We also saw how equality can be promoted from a preventive perspective so that these negative phenomena don’t arise in the first place.
I found it fascinating to see the many ways democracy education is carried out, for example at Fryshuset. It was interesting to hear what schools can do together with parents, for instance with families who have recently immigrated. In youth work, it’s perhaps less familiar to work closely with families.
It was also eye-opening to hear what it’s like to operate when very unpleasant things happen—for example, when young people are very close to gangs or violent conflicts. That can be quite intense, of course! We heard about everything in between these two sides.
I still carry those thoughts and discussions with me. I also gained insights into our own work and what we do. Some things might work somewhere else but not necessarily for us. And it became clear that some things actually work quite well here—such as our basic youth work. Insights emerge when you hear about others’ work.
Music plays, and the large purple letter R of the Peace Education Institute’s logo appears on a violet-and-orange background. The letter R is decorated with a bird’s head. The remaining letters K and I slide into view, along with the year 2025.
EU flag portrayed on the black screen and the text Co-funded by the European Union.
[Music fades ou.]
