Lintulahdenkatu 10,
7. krs
00500 Helsinki
Finlande
- International/Cultural relations
Familia ry nationwide NGO resided in Finland. Our office is located in Helsinki and we have nine staff members at the moment. In addition we have four hourly paid Finnish teachers and interns from universities and people on work trial through employment services. We are publicly funded organisation. Our budget is a bit over 500 000 euros a year. Our biggest funder is the social and health ministry (STEA).
We have around 1000 individual members. Our board is running the organisation and executive director is doing the operatinal managing and developing the organisation. The board is decided by the members in our yearly autumn meetings. Members get to use their power on organisation's matters though spring and autumn meetings.
We belong to the national advisory board of ethnic relations (2020-2024). We work closely with municipalities, ministries and other NGO's who work wit families, multiculturalism, multilingualism, integration, employment and antiracism.
Familia ry – founded in 1988 – is a national expert organisation of intercultural families. We support the wellbeing of intercultural families by offering peer support and volunteer activities, information, and advice. We also aim at making improvements in the social and legal systems, so that the needs of intercultural and multilingual families and Finns would be better met. We are the leading expert and advocate of intercultural families. Our mission is to support intercultural families' two-way integration process in Finland. At the center of our work is to make equality and non-discrimination an integral part of Finnish society.
Familia does peer support for intercultural families in different life situations (having baby, parenthood, relationship, bilingulialism, integration, employment etc). Our peer support groups are volunteer based and lead. We promote multiculturality though our acitivities. We do a lot of expertise work and train professionals in different field. We also organise Finnish courses. Advocacy work is also really big part of our activities.
When it comes to the Anna Lindh Foundation three pillars:
1. Empowering young voices
2. Influencing policymakers
3. Building a movement for dialogue and exchange in the face of growing mistrust and polarization among societies.
we are doing all of that in Familia in Finland. We are trying to influence on more equal and open society, get our intercultural families voice heard and building dialogue. Two way integration is something that we really are keen to promote. It is also the society that has to change when people from different backgrounds are moving to society.
We want to continue our work and maybe through this network find new possibilities for the shared goals that we have.
As an organisation that works with people coming all around the world being a part of ALF network is natural thing. We also want to add dialogoe, make societies more equal, inclusive and prevent polarisation. Working towards these together is important for us and we feel that belonging to this network would bring us more knowledge and information but also that we can offer our expertise and knowledge for others. Collaboration and parterships are more and more important for working for common goals. That's why we would want to partnership in this. Many of your current organisation (in Finnish network) are our partners but still there are many that we haven't worked with or heard before. We share same values and that is of course main thing for joining this network. We want to be also more international.