Building local sustainability with the youth in Kimitoön, Finland

Kimitoön is a rural municipality of about 6 000 inhabitants located in the archipelago in Southwest Finland. It has a good communal spirit and a vivid civil society for a small municipality.

The municipality of Kimitoön sees youth participation locally very important. Kimitoön wishes to be a place, where young people want to return after having studied elsewhere in the beginning of their adulthood. Hence, supporting youth participation was put in the core of the local Transition Arena.

Four workshops bringing civil society, youth actors and the municipality together

There were four elements in the Kimitoön Transition Arena: enabling sustainable local life, supporting local actors, deepening the collaboration of municipality and local civil actors, and making sure the youth have ways to participate in the making of sustainability transitions.

Before the workshops local actors had recognized key issues related to youth participation and sustainable future. Four main ideas came forth:

1. The responsibility to change the society lies in the hands of adults.
2. All youth should have spaces to discuss their thoughts and worries related to sustainability questions.
3. Youngsters already have good ideas, but they wish for more community spirit from their peers.
4. In a geographically large rural municipality, an important sustainability enhancement in youth lives would be to build more bike routes and increase public transport between the municipality’s different centrums.

Altogether 28 representatives of different associations, small enterprises, youth council, individual residents, and the municipality took part in arena workshops. The workshops started from creating a shared understanding of the topic at hand, continued with deciding on the shared transition challenge, used back-casting as a way of creating novel and motivated ideas and ended in formulating these ideas into concrete sustainability experiments.

Common ideas on future direction

The most imminent result from the workshop process was increased positive mindset around local sustainability transitions. Many participants considered the workshops as a refreshing chance to discuss what really matters and think about ways to make a bigger impact together.

The group of arena participants produced a Transition Agenda for sustainable future Kimitoön that presents five transition paths for:

1. sustainable traffic
2. building sustainability with communal spirit, locality, and culture
3. local nature and climate action
4. increasing the production and consumption of local seasonal food,
5. strengthening skills for sustainable life

Each path describes cumulative steps to reach a vision of good sustainable life in Kimitoön. Roles for youth and civil actor participation are defined in the paths.

Community-led sustainability actions

The workshop participants have started to work on the first steps of the paths. In the third workshop some of the formulated actions were voted for immediate implementation.

There are four actions that will start right away:

1) ‘Generationsmöte’ focuses on young and old people meeting and teaching skills of sustainable lifestyle to each other. This also increases communal spirit and social wellbeing and can provide work experience for the youth.
2) ‘Public transport initiative’ is a youth parliament led initiative to push for more public transport in the rural municipality by conducting a survey on residents’ wishes and seeking good examples from other rural municipalities.
3) ‘More plant-based proteins to plates’ aims to familiarize people of all ages to plant-based dishes.
4) A culture project bringing together the municipality’s cultural project, a social enterprise Kulturhus Björkboda, Folkhälsan – an NGO in youth services, and local youth to explore a culture house and artistic ways of expressing themselves to ease loneliness of young people.

The project continues to support collaboration and seeks ways to keep up the holistic way of engaging the youth in creating sustainable future. The workshop participants will be invited to meet and reflect on the Transition Agenda regularly.

More information
Henna Salminen
Project coordinator
Regional Council of Southwest Finland
henna.salminen@varsinais-suomi.fi

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