Browsing by Author "Cantell, Olof"

My thesis is based on interviews I have made with 13 employees within the social work that is practised among adult clients in the city of Helsinki. I have interviewed social workers, social instructors, housing advisers and debt advisers. My interviewees all have in common that they are dealing with issues of unpaid rent or even eviction menace. I wanted to find out how my interviewees consider their professional mobility referring to the organization they work within. I also wanted to know how they see their professional mobility when it comes to preventing evictions. I selected the adult social work within the city of Helsinki because of the fact that the housing and homelessness situation is different in the Helsinki metropolitan region from what it is in the rest of Finland. I also focused on issues combined with economic coping. Since it is hard to find a dwelling in the Helsinki region, the cost of housing is naturally higher than that in the rest of Finland. I also wanted to know if the Finnish social security is sufficient to cover the costs of housing in Helsinki. I have one chapter in a part of which I focus on Finnish legislation. This includes legislation that regulates social care, economic allowance as well as eviction. I collected my material using semi-structured interviews. I interviewed social care professionals who work with cases of eviction and unpaid rent. I recorded all my interviews. Having transcripted my material I went to analyzing. Among the professionals my central focus is put on the housing advisers. As you probably know by the name of the professions, their job is to help with housing. Originally this profession appeared based on the housing first principle. I have a separate chapter for this principle, even though the housing advisers in Helsinki no longer work with homeless clients. Housing advising is seen as a skilled key factor in preventing eviction. It was also within the experience of the housing counselor I interviewed that they possessed sufficient tools to prevent evictions, whereas constant intense combined with big client volumes is seen as a challenging factor in social work. This is seen to decrease the latter ones’ ability to do long term work with clients who have left their rents unpaid. Another challenge that was faced was the high price of housing in Helsinki combined with insufficient social security. With this thesis I want to give adult social work the credit it deserves. There are huge changes facing this sector of social work in Finland. For example the city of Helsinki has recently re-organized its social care. Another big change is the fact that the economic allowance will no longer be run by the municipal social care but by the government controlled Kela.