Tampere together is an interesting example how a city can push the boundaries of community work, to reach disengaged citizens with small ‘hands-on’ mini-projects, low-threshold funding and good coordination and facilitation. The project was able to establish real contact with people who are traditionally very difficult to reach and activate: immigrants, disabled people, the long-term unemployed, people with mental problems, substance abusers and those living in deprived areas of the city.

Executive summary

The city of Tampere in southern Finland has been active for decades in addressing its more deprived areas and neighbourhoods, where there are more than the average number of immigrants, unemployed people, aged people, and people with a low income and education.

With this project, and with ERDF funding, Tampere wanted to find out whether community work could be taken a step further – really to the grass-roots level of citizen initiatives and activities, which without special facilitation and coordination seldom come to the surface where they can come to the city’s notice and gain project funding. The mini-projects in Tampere Together are about small-scale, grass-roots activities and initiatives of the citizens themselves, encouraged, coached and nurtured by very close coordination, and provided with small ‘seed money’ type funding. The mini-projects were run by local associations, parishes and non-profit organisations, together with local citizens, addressing various deprived target groups and suburbs in Tampere, lowering the thresholds of participation in the communities and bringing people together to overcome prejudices and barriers, and to generally activate people in the targeted areas.

‘It was unbelievable – we went out to the community like never before. We would never have done this without this project,’ said a long-term worker from the open care foundation, ‘and we were encouraged to continue like this.’

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Technical information

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