Some families with immigrant backgrounds are going through challenging situations with both children and parents have multiple service and support needs. The Helmi service was established to ensure that these families receive the comprehensive support they need.
The target group of the Helmi service are young people with an immigrant background aged 7–17 who are clients of child welfare or family social work services. The young people may have mental health problems, mild delinquency or difficulties with school attendance, for example. Their families may be burdened not only by the young person’s challenges, but also by financial difficulties, poor literacy skills or a lack of Finnish language skills, for example. The parents often lack the digital skills required to manage in Finnish society, in which case the responsibility for managing family affairs is often transferred to children.
The service has given me more information and increased my confidence.
“We have received support for life management and motivating the children to go to school. I was not confident in dealing with the authorities before, but the service has given me more information and increased my confidence in dealing with them,” says the mother of one client family.
The client work of the Helmi service has focused on practices that break down barriers to receiving help. At the beginning of the service, the young person’s or child’s situation is assessed by a public health nurse. The service also ensures that the parents of the family receive support and assistance from adult social work to strengthen their inclusion and agency.
The Helmi service focuses on language-aware interaction, which can include interpreter-mediated working practices or multilingual staff offering support in the client's mother tongue, for example.
There was a clear demand for aid the Helmi service provides. Many immigrant families were using numerous services at the same time but would have needed substantial support to navigate the service network and understand the services they were receiving.
“Lack of trust and previous bad experiences with the authorities can make it difficult for families to accept help. For professionals, it can also be challenging to recognise the underlying issues that may influence the challenges of families with an immigrant background,” says Helmi Project Manager Minna Larvio.
The Helmi service provides client families with access to a multidisciplinary support team, which includes family work, adult social work and youth health care professionals. The team works with the family to identify their support needs so that help can be tailored to their individual needs.
The support team pays particular attention to building trust and creating a safe space – the professionals are trained in anti-racist and culturally sensitive approaches, and the service takes into account families' individual cultural backgrounds and needs, where possible. Some of the team members have an immigrant background themselves, which is often helpful when trying to understand the situation and service needs of clients.
The Helmi service was launched in December 2023, and in two years it has helped one hundred young people and their families. Experience has shown that the service has been successful in reaching families who have previously been left without adequate help and support. Key factors contributing to this success have been the establishment of a trusting working relationship and multidisciplinary work that takes into account the needs of the whole family.
“We have been monitoring the impact of the model on the lives of children and families during these first years of operation. Of those children whose situation was really difficult at the beginning of the service, about half saw their situation improve during the service,” says Larvio.
“It also seems that the positive changes facilitated by the service persist over the long term as well. Half of the clients were no longer clients of Child Welfare six months after the service, according to the follow-up monitoring.”
Feedback from clients also shows that the work carried out under the model is perceived as client-oriented and safe.
I received a lot of support and help with my children’s and my own affairs.
I was listened to and treated well.
By supporting families and bringing about positive change, the service can prevent children from being placed in substitute care outside their home by Child Welfare. This saves resources at the societal level and is of course desirable for the family as well in most cases.
One of the goals of the Helmi service is to ensure that the young person and their parents perceive the relationship with the workers as safe, which allows them to commit to and become motivated about receiving help and working towards change.
The operating model for young people and families with an immigrant background has also served as a good example for other City of Helsinki services. Anti-racist interaction skills, multidisciplinary teams and genuine teamwork are worth investing in!
Helmi (multidisciplinary family work for young people) was awarded a shared first place in the showcase of the best operating models developed in projects funded with government grants under Sustainable Growth Programme for Finland at the programme’s final seminar in September 2025.
Helmi was developed in 2023–2025 in a Sustainable Growth Programme for Finland project, which was funded by the European Union Recovery Instrument (Next Generation EU). It continues as a permanent part of Helsinki’s child welfare and family social work services.
