The City of Helsinki is launching a major multi-year project with the aim of reforming its digital foundation. According the City Strategy, we want to be the city in the world that best capitalises on digitalisation, and reforming the digital foundation is one of the most important development areas in Helsinki’s digitalisation programme. It covers, among other things, the telecommunications services, the support services, the lifecycle services for data terminals, as well as the server and capacity services.

Helsinki has opened a chat service for young people, the Nuorten chatti, or Young people’s Helsinki, chat service. The service is intended for you, a young resident of Helsinki aged 16–29, and it will initially be open on weekdays 12–16. The chat also serves residents from other municipalities who study in Helsinki and have the right to use the student health care.

The City of Helsinki has created a Helsinki Helpline to contact the self-isolating older population. During the first week of operations, the service called over 10,000 residents over the age of 70 and received over 700 requests for help with trips to the shops and pharmacy. The campaign’s sponsors, joined this week by Yliopiston Apteekki, Posti, and Logisnext Finland, provide many practical aspects of the service.

The City of Helsinki has produced material on coronavirus recommendations and health services in several different languages. Many other public authorities have also issued multilingual material in response to the covid-19 outbreak in Finland.

The Mayor of Helsinki Jan Vapaavuori has decided that starting 4 April, the facade of the Finlandia Hall in central Helsinki will be illuminated with blue lighting every evening. The gesture is meant to honour workers in the health care industry and other sectors who are providing vital services during the covid-19 crisis.

Do you need support or guidance in coping with your family’s day-to-day life? Helsinki’s Family phone service is here to help! Our social services professionals can assist you to work out childrearing dilemmas, address challenges associated with parenthood, and assist with daily tasks you might find overwhelming. The Family phone service also offers advice on how to handle issues involving teenagers.

The Biennial cannot be opened to the public on 12 June, as originally intended. The final estimate of whether the event can at all be organised in the upcoming summer will be made in April.

On 30 March, the Finnish government decided that children and youth enrolled in basic education, general upper secondary education and vocational education institutions would continue to attend distance learning, due to the coronavirus epidemic. This means that the official recommendation for students to study from home will carry on uninterrupted until 13 May 2020.