Neighbourhood mothers 2017 Neighborhood mothers: Community change agents | Page 9

A round-up of our events in Helsinki BEING A FRIEND EVENT LAW EVENINGS Our Neighbourhood Mothers from Helsinki participated in the Being a Friend event (kaaveriksi, in Finnish) organized by the Finnish Refugee Council on 11th October. The purpose of the event was to allow immigrant and Finnish women to get to know each other and become friends, and sure enough, our Neighbourhood Mothers made Finnish friends and chatted the evening away. In collaboration with Monika Naiset ry and a couple of volunteer pro bono lawyers, Nicehearts has been regularly organizing ‘Law Evenings’. Topics of interest to Neighbourhood Mothers such as children’s rights, violence and so on, are discussed from a legal perspective. These informative evenings have helped our Neighbourhood Mothers get to know more about their legal rights in Finland. Every meeting is concluded with a question-and-answer session. INTEGRATION INFO EVENT The Integration Info Event, an annual event, organized by Moniheli ry. was held on 27th October. The event was held in collaboration with Nicehearts and other organizations that are involved in integration programs. We spoke about our Neighbourhood Mothers’ project to partners, shareholders and those interested in learning more about what we do. We also shared how our project has helped and continues to help the integration process of immigrants in Finland. GROUP MEETINGS FOR KURDI- SPEAKING SYRIAN WOMEN Our Neighbourhood Mother, Khallata Demir, started a weekly group discussion for Kurdi-speaking Syrian women. The women get together and discuss a wide range of topics such as the integration process, family, mental health and so on. INFO-SESSION ON JOB-SEEKING FOR 40- 50 YEAR-OLD WOMEN A lot of recruiting events and peer mentoring sessions are organized by many organizations, but, the target group, mostly seems to be job seekers who are 20-40 year olds. Our Neighbourhood Mothers who are in the 40-50 age group were concerned about not being able to benefit from many of the events and mentoring sessions. To address this problem, Nicehearts ry organized an info- session in collaboration with Monik ry. We invited a couple of experts from Diakonissalaitos to share some practical job- hunting tips and provide guidance to our Neighbourhood Mothers who were in the 40- 50 age group.