The City of Helsinki’s free periodical Helsinki-lehti will be delivered to every home in the city this week. The publication’s page in English has information on the city’s plans to hire a more diverse staff, an important website update, and fun summer activities. Make sure to look for it on page 24.
The feature story in the publication is an interview with Hannah King. King has worked in various jobs for the Social Services and Healthcare Division in her 15 years at the city, and is now designing on-the-job training programmes in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and digitalisation for the division’s near 15,000 employees.
“The more our personnel look like the people we are serving, the better services we can provide, because we would then have a better understanding of different cultures, languages and religions,” King says.
A subcommittee of the Helsinki City Council recently approved the Helsinki Action Plan for Work-, Study- and Entrepreneurship-Based Immigration, which outlines Helsinki’s objectives for attracting and retaining international businesses and workers. One of the more ambitious goals of the plan is to increase the proportion of foreign-language speakers in the municipal workforce to the same level found in the general population, around 17 per cent.
The English-language page also celebrates an important new website update. InfoFinland, a primary source of vital information for newcomers to Finland, has a fresh new look and improved navigation. The claim to fame of the site is its language selection: the same useful content about finding your bearings and settling in is available in 12 languages!
Helsinki-lehti’s English page also has some handy tips on affordable summer boating and outdoor opportunities, a reminder about civil defence shelters, and a few details about what the city is doing for people fleeing the war in Ukraine.
Each issue of Helsinki-lehti has two pages in Swedish and one page in English, in addition to the content in Finnish. Helsinki-lehti is available in an accessible online format at julkaisut.hel.fi(Link leads to external service).
Additional information:
City of Helsinki to take active role
in attracting international businesses and workers
InfoFinland website(Link leads to external service)
Information about the Ukraine
situation
Photo: Tuija Hyttinen