Helsinki is to introduce youth counselling service developed in South Africa

Online counselling service developed for the youth community in the slums of Cape Town will be launched in Finland

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By Tuomas Peltomäki
     
      The Helsinki Deaconess Institute is looking for new methods for finding young people who are at a risk of social exclusion and marginalisation.
      With the help of the Aalto University, a partner was found from a rather surprising direction, namely South Africa.
      The Jamiix counselling service, which was developed in Cape Town, is seen as a tool to help the Deaconess Institute’s youth workers get in contact with young people who have been stuck in their homes or in some other way remained outside society - for one reason or another.
     
”In our job it is difficult to encourage young people to get in touch with us”, says Ulla Nord, who is in charge of the youth activity centre VAMOS at the Deaconess Institute.
      VAMOS is a 3-year project funded by the Ministry of Education, aiming at strengthening young people’s own resources.
      ”For many young people, seeking help is difficult and shameful, which is why this is an excellent route for them”, Nord notes.
      The Jamiix service makes it possible to discuss with social workers by deploying online chat services.
     
The service is exceptionally suited to youth work, because it does not require much from young people themselves to get in touch with social and youth workers.
      Instead, the professional helpers behind the service, including the Deaconess Institute’s social and youth workers and physicians, will have to register, enter their information, log in, and to learn how to use the service.
      ”But those young people who need help can make contact directly, for example through Facebook, Google, or some other online chatroom."
      ”In this way, it is possible to ask for help by deploying the methods which young people use when they stay in contact with the outside world”, explains Development Director Liisa Björklund, of the Helsinki Deaconess Institute.
      The threshold of making contact by going online is considerably lower than that of making a phone call, says Marlon Parker, the founder of the company which developed the service in the first place.
     
It is also a question of security, Parker notes. Jamiix was developed for South African conditions, for the young drug-users in slums of Cape Town, whose phone-bill might well be scanned by a father or mother, or even by a drug-dealer.
      Jamiix can be used anonymously; in other words, the identity of the young person is hidden.
      Nevertheless, the service maintains so much information that when a young customer contacts it again, he or she can be directed to the worker who is already familiar with his or her situation.
      With the help of the counselling service, it is also easy to transfer the young customer during the conversation to the right kind of expert, for example from a youth worker to a physician or a psychologist.
     
The Helsinki Deaconess Institute estimates that the new counselling service will be launched within a couple of weeks.
      At the outset of the project, the online mobile chat platform will be open only two days a week, but the number of hours will be increased if the need arises.
     
     
BACKGROUND: Help for half a million South Africans
     
In its home country South Africa, Jamiix has been a success. Up to half a million young people are using the service, reports Marlon Parker, the founder of the Jamiix counselling service.
      ”The entire project started from a certain school, where ten pupils began to use it. Then the word started spreading, and now we have a huge number of users”, Parker notes.
      ”The counselling services for young adults in South Africa were chock-full, leaving many young people with the feeling that they were being snubbed”, Parker continues.
     
MarlonParker himself, a lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, grew up in poor circumstances. He understood how much more helpful more intensive conversation could be especially for young people who were dabbling with drugs and facing the HIV problem.
      ”Young people could ask for example whether it would be worthwhile to experiment with heroin”, Parker adds.
      Parker himself was lifted out of slums by the church, but his younger brother is sitting in a prison cell after getting a jail sentence for drug offences.
      ”I very much appreciate preventive social work in particular, for which Jamiix is very suitable, as the threshold to make contact is so low. However, it is also helpful in crisis situations”, Parker concludes.
     
The cooperation with the Helsinki Deaconess Institute was not a pure coincidence. Two projects of Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, namely SAFIPA (South Africa-Finland Knowledge Partnership on ICT) and COFISA (Cooperation Framework on Innovation Systems Between Finland and South Africa) were found to be among the financiers of the RLABS (Reconstructed Living Lab) and Jamiix progammes founded by Parker.
      Aalto University acted as a midwife in the project, and will be overseeing its technical implementation.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.8.2011


Links:
  RLABS (Reconstructed Living Lab)
  Helsinki Deaconess Institute
  SAFIPA (South Africa-Finland Knowledge Partnership on ICT)

TUOMAS PELTOMÄKI / Helsingin Sanomat
tuomas.peltomaki@sanoma.fi