Kimmo Kumlander is the CEO of the Finnish NGO Silta-Valmennusyhdistys, which works in the area of Tampere, and also a founder and a CEO of nationwide NGO Valo-Valmennusyhdistys. Both organisations work with vulnerable groups of people, including young people involved with the justice system, with a commitment to make them more visible in society and to give them opportunities to make their voices heard at every level of decision-making.

Prior to this work, Kumlander worked at Humak University of Applied Sciences, as a member of the rectorate responsible for the RDI work and international relations of the university. He has published many articles on topics related to rehabilitation, desistance, vulnerable young people and social entrepreneurship, among others.

Kumlander is also active on the international stage when it comes to helping vulnerable groups. For example, he is member of the executive committee at Rehabilitation International and chair of its standing commission for work and employment. He is also the founder of WISE Finland, an umbrella organization for work integration in Finland.

NGOs Silta and Valo employ more than 250 experts who work towards rehabilitation, education and working life participation for vulnerable groups.

From your point of view, what are the most urgent matters that the youth justice system in Finland needs to address?

The Finnish public sector is undergoing large scale budget cuts and the right wing government emphasises very hard and even harsh measures for young people in conflict with the law instead of research-based methodology. In practice, this means young people in conflict with the law get punished but don’t get proper education, rehabilitation or other help to go on with their lives as members of society. Also, the cuts to the public school system and social and healthcare system leave vulnerable young people without safety nets when problems occur. The stigma against these young people and their families is still huge and often they are pushed out of the system at the time when it would be quite easy and affordable to help them by offering support to the whole family.

Could you describe the main ideas behind the approach taken by Silta and Valo for working with youth in conflict with the law?

The main idea is to always work towards societal integration and participation. The basic idea is that a young person is always the best expert on their life. They have to be supported towards their own dreams and future plans. Yet, at the same time, many of them need help building a true and healthy self-image and understanding of their social and intellectual capabilities. We also always want to give them the stage to use their own voice so that it is heard in decision-making everywhere, from our own organization to the Parliament.

Silta and Valo teach professional skills to young people in conflict with the law and/or at risk of social exclusion to facilitate their insertion into the job market. How do you organize your training activities for this purpose?

We work always closely together with educational institutes and the labour market. To facilitate the acquisition of professional skills, we use mainly informal learning environments, such as our own restaurants and gyms, and progress the whole time towards the labour market. We also teach basic and academic skills in these informal environments. The educational institutes are necessary so that these people get an official certificate of their studies. For a long time, this was all about primary and vocational education, but increasing numbers of young people now progress also towards higher education, studying for a university degree.  When we started, many people and institutions said that there is no need for this kind of services for higher education, but the numbers have surprised us all.

Because of the public sector budget cuts, it is becoming increasingly hard to finance these actions. We have to constantly find new ways to make this work also financially. It often feels very frustrating, as anyone could easily see how beneficial this work is financially for the public sector, not to mention the young people and their families and their human rights and dignity.

In what other ways do Silta and Valo promote the social inclusion of young people in their communities?

When addressing young people in conflict with law, this is a big issue. Many of these people have a very negative self-image and they have been socially excluded from most of conventional social communities for young people. They are either very lonely or they have built up their own social network of peers who have been excluded in kindergartens, in schools and from leisure time activities.

We need to offer them safe environments with safe adults, and possibilities to start building up a new social network and find leisure time activities that are interesting for them. From our perspective, there are no shortcuts to this. We provide outreach work, online communities, open space activities, leisure time activities, such as open gym hours, open arts groups (theater, music, movies, etc.), adventure and sail training, and also work towards situations where these young people will find social communities and leisure time activities for themselves within society.

We also very much promote knowledge-building within society and among the experts who work with young people. Quite often, the stigma and the problems that these young people have faced make many experts afraid of working with them. We can help by making information easily available and accessible for the experts.

You also participate in various EU-funded projects that seek to improve the lives of young people in conflict with the law. Could you tell us about the issues that you are working on at the moment?

At the moment we have a few very interesting issues that we are working on in this field:

1. We work with young people’s own trauma history. We have developed a trauma-sensitive working model to recognize and help young people in conflict with the law. In Finland, the victims of crimes are offered a lot of support but children who commit the crimes lack support and only receive the punishment. Yet almost all of them already have a severe trauma history of their own which should be addressed properly.

2. We work with gender and sexual diversity among young people in conflict with the law. Women, non-binary people and other sexual minorities have plenty of specific issues which should be addressed and which often remain hidden, causing a lot of unnecessary problems and distress.

3. We work with neurodiversity and specifically with primary language and communication issues among young people in conflict with the law. These rates are very high among young people in conflict with the law compared to the average of the general population. We work on understanding, rehabilitating and further researching these issues, which have mostly been unnoticed in the public services. These young people often have no diagnoses, no rehabilitation and no proper support, only punishment. We try to reverse this, so that these young people are first diagnosed and supported, and therefore not punished for things that have not been noticed.

In your view, what are the main advantages of participating in EU-funded projects on the topics of youth justice?

There is always a lot to be learned, both from the legal and ethical framework in other countries and also from the methodology of other organisations that work in this field.

We also try to involve young people themselves to participate in the projects and their international meetings. Vulnerable young people often have plenty of prejudices against different cultures, even in Europe. Our experience of working together on European projects helps them a lot to gain insight and understanding into young people’s lives in different countries and circumstances. And it often also helps them to gain insight into their own life situations and uncover new pathways to their own participation.

And, of course, the projects offer our experts plenty of possibilities to gain further experience and expertise in this subject area.