Three solutions for a more equal future from the foundation sector

A better future cannot be achieved without the vision, participation, and voices of young people themselves. Work carried out within foundations offers three practical solutions for building a better future for young people across sectoral boundaries.

For the past couple of years, we have been spearheading efforts to promote equality within the foundation sector in collaboration with the Association of Finnish Foundations. In 2025, we ran an equality accelerator designed to strengthen Finnish foundations' capacity for purposeful equality work through peer learning.

Here are three practical solutions for building a better future:

Solution 1: Recognize "youthsplaining"

It is easy to worry about young people, but how can they be included in conversations that concern them? The Brita Maria Renlund Foundation—an organization dedicated to supporting groups and entities working with children and youth—dared to address this question.

Even before participating in the equality accelerator program, the foundation had noticed that the voices of young people were not sufficiently heard in its operations and had decided to establish a youth expert group. The accelerator provided new perspectives and tools to support this development; notably, the recruitment for the expert group was conducted via an open call. Indeed, the first step toward a better future for young people is to address "youthsplaining"—situations where challenges facing youth are discussed without their own voices and expertise being included.

Solution 2: The "youth-to-youth" principle

How can young people be reached and engaged? Svenska kulturfonden supports Swedish-language activities in Finland by awarding grants for science, culture, education, and research. Although the grants are open to all applicants within the scope of the foundation’s mission, Kulturfonden recognized that not everyone in the target demographic perceived the organization as equally approachable.

Svenska kulturfonden set out to lower the barrier for young people to make contact via social media, and recently, the foundation has published a significant amount of content produced by young people themselves. Another solution for building a better future for young people is to leverage a "from us, for us" approach—offering the organization’s own platforms for content, encounters, and discussions that young people can relate to, created by young people for young people.

Solution 3: Open the doors to diversity

What happens when doors are opened to young people? The Finnish Cultural Foundation champions science, art, and culture, working to build a pluralistic and sustainable society.

Through its work on equality, the Foundation recognized the need to increase youth representation and diversity within the workplace, leading it to launch an internship program for international students. A third solution for a better future lies in the courage to welcome people from diverse backgrounds into the workplace. At its best, workplace diversity permanently enriches an organization’s operational culture at the level of its structures.

What would your organization’s culture, daily routines, or job roles look like from a young person’s perspective if you dared to open those doors?

How to keep everyone on board?

Simply keeping doors open to everyone is not enough to build a better tomorrow. I have personally walked into rooms as the youngest person present, only to hear people decades my senior speak about young people with concern and indignation—as if I weren't even there.

The key to building a better tomorrow lies in recognizing and strengthening the agency of young people themselves. The cultivation of the future cannot be measured by individual peak performances, success, or learning outcomes. Instead, the cultivation of the future is measured by how well we succeed in keeping all young people engaged.

This article was originally published on the blog for OAJ’s "Great Growth Discussion" (Suuri kasvukeskustelu) seminar. The Association of Finnish Foundations (Säätiöt ja rahastot ry) was one of the event partners for the Great Growth Discussion.