United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

The initial idea of the project was that, if the mass of young people who meet each other online all gathered in the marketplace at the same time, the society and municipal youth work would react strongly and people would be willing to work with the phenomenon. Nevertheless, that was not the case. On the contrary, internet and social interaction there was seen as somewhat sinister and threatening to both, young and to youth workers. Communication via internet was not seen as real, comparing it to face-to-face interaction.
Also, municipal youth work had no contact with those teenagers using internet at that time. At the same there was decrease in amount of visitors in traditional youth houses and clubs around Finland capitol area.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
Netari online youth work is performed in two Finnish network environments popular with young people, Habbo and IRC-Galleria. The Netari online youth facility works in both environments, making it possible for young people to have real-time conversations both with other youths and with trained youth work professionals. These youth work facilities are open six nights a week. Young people have the possibility of making contacts with adults easily. The adult is possibly working in the young person’s home town or close to it. The young person can select the depth of the contact. He/she can go and say hello, exchange a few words, ask opinions or advice and describe his/her worries. In encounters, the expertise of the Netari workers is collectively available through a speech connection, in which case the worker can simultaneously consult his/her colleagues. As well as virtual contacts, Netari organizes real world get-togethers for the youths who use the facility, and also a national Netari camp once a year. Young people are also offered a chance to be trained as voluntary assistant youth workers who take part in the performance of online youth work with the help of an actual Netari youth worker. The aim of the Netari.fi is to develop youth work done over the Internet and to create a coherent work model and working culture for national Internet youth work. Through multi-professional cooperation, the Netari.fi aims to lower the threshold for those youths using the facility to seek social and health services when necessary. The plan is to also bring the services, through the Netari operation, straight to the Internet environments popular among young people. The police will also contribute to this multi-professional environment. Online youth work is valuable preventive work that supports both healthy growth and development, and social inclusion in the young. In this modern society, it is more and more important to provide young people with access to reliable adults. Through online youth work, contacts have been achieved even with the kind of youths who traditional youth work services do not reach. In their own online environments, such as Habbo and IRC-gallery, young people find it easier to ask adults for advice, to discuss matters and share their worries. The Netari activities offer young people an adult presence and somebody to listen, as well as guidance and advice in problem situations. The Child and Youth Policy Programme also highlights the multi-professional cooperation of municipalities as an important part of promoting children’s and young people’s well-being. This multi-professional cooperation includes such services as social and health care, the youth department, schools and the police. The aim is to bring professionals from a variety of fields (e.g. the Web Nurse and the police) online to serve young people in real time through the Netari multi-professional development operation. Young people’s participation in the planning and development of the services aimed at them is considered important in the Netari operation.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The opening words of Netari.fi were pronounced in 2002 by two youth workers working in Helsinki area. Concrete planning was started in autumn of 2003. In December, the ideas were presented to Lasse Siurala, Director of Youth in the City of Helsinki. In addition to Helsinki, cities of Espoo, Kauniainen and Vantaa were also invited to prepare the operations. The town representatives met for the first time in January 2004, when the establishment of the cooperation was agreed upon, goals were set for the future activities and operational models were planned in order to achieve the set goals. In September 2004, Helsinki Youth Department agreed upon the full-time work of two employees for developing online work. External financing was applied for Netari.fi and it was received from the Ministry of Education for the years 2004-2007. Due to the good results, in the fall of 2007 the Ministry of Education granted the City of Helsinki Youth Department project funding and a mandate to begin expanding the operation at a national level. Since fall 2008, Netari.fi has included the youth work units of as many as 18 municipalities. In each municipality, one or more youth workers perform part-time online youth work, as a part of their job description. The City of Helsinki Youth Department is the centralized unit responsible for coordinating and developing the operation with the support of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. As a result of the three-year development project, online youth work carried out according to the model set out by Netari was added to the Finnish Government’s Child and Youth Policy Programme 2007-2011. The target of this program is to have a national online multi-professional youth center working in Finland by the end of 2009.

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The purpose is to carry out youth work among young people and transfer youth work to a popular online environment functioning in real-time. The primary objective is to reach those young people who are not within the existing youth work services. These youngsters use online environments as their social interaction channels primarily or often. Participation in the operations is free and voluntary for young people. The operations are aimed at improving the availability of youth work. As a result, young people who cannot or do not want to go to youth centres can have a reliable contact to youth workers. For youth work, social network sites provides a unique opportunity of making contacts and communicating different activities to the majority of 10-20-year-old young people in Finland. No other network environment gathers young people within two environments. The objective is to meet young people in the online environment, provide them with a possibility of a contact to adult youth work professionals. The contact is to be maintained stable over a long period. As a result, the youth worker must be available in the network regularly. Some of the contacts are trained as assistants, the task of whom is to act as peer instructors in the online environment and real-world meetings and activities. The assistants can use the netari.fi website as their means of communications and update the content. Some of the encountered youngsters are to be forwarded to a body which can help and support them in different situations of life. These bodies include different services e.g. Web-nurse, police and array of municipal organisations and the Non -Governmental Organizations.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The last year and a bit have seen the Netari.fi project expand from a regional development to a national venture. The Netari operation has expanded to 14 new municipalities, and more will be joining in the project from the beginning of 2009. From the six that started at the beginning, the number of Netari youth workers has increased to 50, and opening times have expanded from three to six nights a week. As well as Habbo, the Netari activity was launched at the beginning of 2008 in a new environment in the Internet community called IRC-Galleria, where the number of registered Finnish users has exceeded half a million. Of these, over 192,000 belong to the Netari target group of 13–17 year-olds. (The statistics of registered users of IRC-Galleria web pages Sep 29th 2008). Various types of development activity have been started within the project, the most prominent of which have recently been operations in Swedish, joint research projects and multi-professional Internet youth work. As a new work method, the Netari operation is constantly being developed, and in this the research data of the field plays a vital role. Netari’s multi-professional development work has been organized for the years 2008 and 2009, and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health is funding the operation. Through multi-professional operations, the project aims, on the one hand, to lower the threshold for those young people using the facility to seek social and health services when necessary and, on the other hand, to bring services for young people to network environments. In addition, the project provides Netari youth workers with care management content and further training on referring the youth in question to a specialist. Netari’s most important partners in developing online social and health care are the Helsinki City Social Services Department and the Web Nurse project began fall 2009 in the Helsinki Health Center. Biggest development step in near future is to secure permanent funding to Finnish online youth work.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
There have been few problems in cooperation. In few cities, employees were unable to access the social network sites using the town’s computers. The firewall prevented the access and the firewall settings were not changed in spite of requests. As a result, a commercial Internet connection had to be acquired in the workers’ office in order to access necessary environments. As an example, the Vantaa employees mainly worked at home. In Espoo, one problem was also caused by the restriction over the use of certain applications in the town’s workstations. Similar challenges also took place in Helsinki. Another clear challenge is finding time for the work. The involved towns were committed to work a certain amount of time in the online environment every month. However, the employees involved in the project often had to carry out their other tasks and they had to do excessive work, in which case some employees had to carry a duplicated workload. Since the beginning there has been consulting to the workers supervisors and the workload in these occasions has decreased. Due to the nature of work, cooperation with commercial service providers is necessary. Our cooperation companies, Sulake Suomi Oy, Sulake Corp and Dynamoid Oy, have made this work possible through their effort and cooperated in very good spirit. It is useful for municipal youth work that it does not need to invest in the development and maintenance of the online youth work environments; instead, it can focus on its key competence area – youth work. For companies, municipal youth work raises positive publicity in the society. One problem in cooperation is that all of the wishes and requests related to the development of the environment cannot be carried out because their implementation does not match the objectives of the companies. Whenever cooperation does not produce business profit, municipal cooperation is not a high priority inside companies.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The fact that Netari functions in commercial surroundings is exceptional in a local government setting in Finland. The cooperation has worked well and, despite the skeptics’ doubts, the commercial character of the network environment has not caused problems for the performance of youth work. At no stage of the cooperation has money changed hands – instead, the parties feel that they benefit mutually from the current situation. Suvi Lindén, Minister of Communications, has recently spoken about the progressiveness of the Netari.fi project in its use of social media in the public sector at various events. As a national project, the Netari operation crosses municipal border lines. The online youth work, coordinated by the City of Helsinki Youth Department and carried out through different municipalities, is constructing a new kind of network of cooperation between the Youth Departments of Finland’s municipalities. At a local level, the border between the web and the real world is crossed in the assistant advisor program taking place in Helsinki and Tampere, where interested young people between the ages of 14 and 17 are trained to operate as peer advisors for Netari. The larger cities organize real life get-togethers where contacts made over the web become face-to-face encounters. As well as geographical borders, the Netari operation also crosses the borders of local organizations. In cooperation with the City of Helsinki Social Services Department and Health Center, the multi-professional project includes the planning and implementation of appropriate models for online social and health work to serve young people. The aim is to find models of operation in which the service continuum for young people crosses the border between the web and the real world. Right from the start, models acquired through the development work will be constructed as part of the structure of the social and health services directed at young people. In the spring of 2009, the Web Nurse will begin serving customers in Netari by giving young people real-time online health advice. The overall development is supported by worker journals, monthly reports and customer queries. The material of the journals and monthly reports is analysed among Netari.fi and in co-operation with third-party researchers or research associations. Customer queries are usually carried out in cooperation with an outside party. During Netari.fi work there has been several customer queries made. These have resulted in studies in cooperation with the Lappeenranta University of Technology, the Finnish Youth Research Society, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The Netari project has taken municipal youth work into the 21st Century. The contact environment of the traditional, unhurried youth work has been made possible in network environments, where more and more Finnish youths spend some of their free time. The Netari project is making it possible for the first time to perform local, real-time work, with a real human presence, on social relations on the web. This means that Netari is also an international pioneer whose work is continually being introduced to foreign visitors. In developing the Netari model of work, its transferability to other environments and different organizations has been taken into account from the very beginning. The target of this national project is to standardize the working culture and work model of youth work performed online in Finland. It is now also easier for municipalities to take part in online youth work, because they do not have to develop the initial processes themselves. Centralized coordination also saves costs for the municipalities. A coherent culture for municipal online work is also in the interests of young people. The Netari.fi project consults different parties in developing its network operation and trains representatives of cooperating parties for online work. The Netari youth workers form a new kind of community of teleworkers, whose members have given positive feedback on its functionality. Youth workers from different municipalities can take part in making decisions on practical matters in team discussions composed through a VoIP connection. The VoIP connection is also used in the youth workers’ mutual communications during real-time chat services. The speech connection means that workers have the team’s “collective intelligence” constantly at their disposal as well as real-time job control. This work method has proven an efficient way to support the youth workers’ continual process of on-the-job learning and to improve the service young people get. There are two annual training programs where the youth workers meet.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
When the Netari project was founded, an immeasurable amount of money was saved by the decision to take the operation to a web environment already popular among the young, instead of building, developing and marketing a completely new environment. In his study, Merikivi (2007) has calculated the value of popular social web services and concluded that the amount is several million euro. Developing online youth work at the City of Helsinki Youth Department has been of immense PR value to the City. The project is helping to build a reputation for Helsinki as a national, even an international, pioneer. Many researchers have also taken an interest in online youth work research (e.g. Jani Merikivi 2007: Netari.fi – nuorisotyön arvo (Netari.fi – The Value of Youth Work); Caven-Pöysä & al 2007: Virtahepo-hanke (The Hippopotamus Project)) which adds to the visibility of this work. The research on the Netari project has been implemented in cooperation with, among others, the Finnish Youth Research Society, Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences, and the Finnish Society on Media Education. As the project is still young, no actual effect research has been carried out as yet. A plan has been laid to order an outside evaluation of the results of the development work for the multi-professional online youth work project for the years 2008 and 2009. As preventive work, online youth work is, above all, an investment in the future. The Netari.fi project has been monitoring its operations right from the start through visitor counters and workers’ follow-up reports. There are clear parameters of the visitors to Netari that are comparable to youth center operations. During 2007, the Netari facility was visited by 54,837 youths in all, 6,524 of who had a discussion with a youth worker. Approximately 110,000 young people are estimated to have visited Netari during 2008. One effect that can be seen is the fact that, through online youth work, a low-threshold youth work contact can be achieved even in the more remote areas of Finland or even with young expatriate Finns.


Institution Name:		City of Helsinki, Youth Department
Institution Type:		Public Organization
Contact Person:		Lasse Siurala
Title:		Director of Youth
Telephone/ Fax:		+358 50 559 1700
Institution's / Project's Website:		+358 9 310 89099
E-mail:		lasse.siurala@hel.fi
Address:		P. O. B. 5000
Postal Code:		00099
City:		Helsingin kaupunki
State/Province:
Country:		Finland

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information