The Green Seniors in Finland have 42 members. We are lucky to have a great group of active seniors. Our meetings are online and it usually seems to be a lot of issues on the list. Once a year we keep a hybrid meeting for all our members in Helsinki.
The areal and municipal elections took place last spring 2025 and we gave some marketing support to our members. Also this year, our members have held both regional and municipal positions of trust which is to be very proud of.
20 of our members participated in the municipal and regional elections – it’s half of us! We seniors got several positions of trust. To mention some of them, a membership in several regional Senior Citizens’ Councils all over the country, also sitting in the Senior Councils in different municipalities and towns. In addition some of us represent The Green Seniors in the working committees of larger welfare regions.
We seniors proved again to be active and useful for our society!
Our action plan for this year has not been fulfilled but we already have achieved a lot.
We had an educational seminar in collaboration with the Green Party’s Vision Study Center under the title “Full Life” with the topic in aging in Finland. We invited two highly respected and qualified experts to give the input for our discussion. We were around thirty, both younger and older green members, which was a real joy!
A new collaboration with the Vision Study Center is already in planning for next year with the topic ”Older people coping with digitality and online criminality”.
Also did we arrange a meetings online with a psychologist, another with some congress representants of the Green Party, in order to let them know about different issues in the life of old people. It’s not always from our side that we’ve met online but sometimes we’ve got an invitation from members of Parliament to highlight at an important moment what’s up in the seniors´life.
We compiled a summary of the Greens’ Ageing Policy Program, which has been distributed at various events. The original wider example is a part (written by us) of The Green Party’s political statement written by us.
There are 13 national associations within the party that has this year worked quite actively together, and we are one of them. These associations are substance based like us. In addition every member of the Green Party belongs to the local Greens.
We keep up older peoples views and needs as well as the importance to work with all ages together in our Green Party. This is most natural wen we have the yearly Party Conferences. We are very concerned of age discrimination and ageism in Finland. The common views and atmosphere are poor to see the huge resources older citizens have and are willing to share.
It seems that more work needs to be done on influencing within the Party as well to get the voices and experiences of older people to emerge.
For Finland’s Senior Citizens’ Council Day, we had Auni-Marja Vilavaara present on the panel and Birgit Backlund-Palander and Taina Törmä online.
We are very happy to have representation in the European Green Seniors, Pirkko Telaranta and now also Taina Törmä as a deputy.
We look forward to possibilities to cooperate with European green seniors in order to make this world a better place also for the old people. Discrimination in any form is not acceptable! We have to confess that age discrimination exists before we are ready to make difference.
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