Sitra to launch a training programme on social change and the economy

Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, will again launch training operations aimed at decision-makers. The training programme concerns the challenges faced by societies and economies in the 2010s.

“Societies are encountering increasingly complex challenges, and solutions have to be found to tackle them. We have observed a clear need for a training programme that would reinforce social and financial vitality, and which would attract a large number of participants from different sectors. Training like this will make it possible to engage in dialogue, seek new solutions, and think together,” says Mikko Kosonen, President of Sitra.

Sitra’s Sources of Finnish Vitality development programme has provided the spark for relaunching the training for decision-makers, which will be implemented with new themes and methods. The Sources of Finnish Vitality development programme, which was launched in autumn 2009, has engaged a group of about 200 members of society to seek solutions to the question of where Finland could draw its vitality from in the future. The development programme has been chaired by Sari Baldauf, at the invitation of Sitra.

The programme has developed actions from opinions on how the financial and economic crises currently gripping the world, climate change, an aging population and the development of information and communication technology will alter Finland’s operating environment. The programme’s last opinion leader forum took place on 23 March 2010. Tarja Halonen, the President of the Republic of Finland, also attended the forum as a panel discussion participant.

In connection with the panel discussion, the approximately 200 participants of the opinion leader forum also gave their views on immigration, which has recently been the subject of intense debate. The outcome of the audience voting organised for the opinion leaders was that the most significant challenge for Finland in terms of immigration is that the country has not internalised the importance of immigration for Finland’s vitality (52% of voters). The fact that we do not distinguish work-related immigration with asylum and refugee policies was voted as another challenge (32% of voters).

The forum held a special ‘Vitality effort’ in which new concrete ideas and projects in the fields of well-being, leadership and entrepreneurship were presented and processed. Click the first link below to read about the projects and the themes addressed.

The results of the Sources of Finnish Vitality development programme will be published as a report on 29 April 2010.

Opinion leader forum participants»

For more information, please contact: