Tervetuloa kotiin!
Do you know that Finland is one of the best places to be a mom/dad? Well, the country is ready to provide maternity/paternity leave for both parents. Also, the parents get help from the government to raise the children, and the schools are free. No wonder why it is a good place to have kids.
Another beautiful thing is that when you are expecting a baby, the government sends you home a maternity package. Yes! A toolkit for new babies. This tradition started in 1938 and it has remained through time. The items that are included vary in colour and patterns through the years, but they are mostly the same since decades ago. The box where everything comes in, also serves as a first bed for the newborn, so you will sometimes hear that your Finnish friends have been sleeping in a box when they were babies! So, in a way, every baby has at least a first bed to sleep in (speak about equality!).
Anyhow, this is a beautiful tradition that I would hope continues through time. But what about the rest of the population that hasn't been born in Finland and emigrates to the country? They, of course haven't experienced a welcoming like Finnish babies have.
Moving to another country always causes a lot of stress, finding a place to live, making the necessary arrangements, getting an ID, well, this is just the start of the journey. This process can be difficult or not, depending on how well the services are arranged for the newcomers. In addition, moving to a country where you don't know/speak the language would add uncertainty and will slow the process of you getting all matters in order.Once you have gone through the first arrangements, there is a process where you start feeling yourself at "home". You start looking for friends, hobbies, studies, etc., and you start to be "independent" in your new home. This is a step that might take months or years, depending on the city's readiness to embrace new cultures.
Finland has very good services, and avant-garde infrastructure, however, is still not always easy to find information. This is due to the language barrier, and the segregation of services. Tampere, is a middle size Finnish city, however, it is still not straight forward to find information when it comes to services for foreigners. Therefore, we have come up with a new way of improving this situation.
Thinking of all the new international comers, we have thought on the creation of a "Survival kit for Tampere". This toolkit follows the same idea as the maternity package; in other words, it contains the essential information that an immigrant would need upon arrival.
This is an initiative from our campaign and something we want to push forward. Of course this would be a "nice" national initiative, however we are more realistic than that. We want to promote it from Tampere to the nation, in other words, a product "Made in Tampere". So how do we start? We need a group of passionate people, designers, brainstormers and policy makers to start putting together our first edition of the "Tervetuloa Kotiin: A survival kit for Tampere". One last question remains thou, who do we vote for, Tappara or Ilves?
Extra info:
http://www.kela.fi/web/en/maternitypackage
