#Girlstakeover the Embassy of Finland, once again!

On Wednesday 24 October we had the privilege of having two young female professionals to come and take over our the Embassy of Finland. This time around, we were not the only Embassy in Canberra to experience a restructure in our leadership - in total 12 embassies gave a chance to young women aged 18-22 to try a career in diplomacy for a day. The event was organised by The Girls Leadership Network; an initiative that aims at empowering and inspiring young women to explore the field of foreign service.

Shaylah and Kaitlin filming for the social media campaign.

In the morning two very enthusiastic women, Kaitlin and Shaylah, stepped into our Embassy. After a quick introduction and tour around the building, the ladies tackled the first challenge of the day; creating a social media campaign on the Finnish forest relationship. In no time they conducted research, innovated a filming strategy and came up a compelling script. They asked two of our staff members to perform on the film and successfully guided two of them through the difficulties of English language pronunciation and finger clicking (especially the latter turned out to be a real struggle).

Get together in our concert hall.

After lunch, we took the ladies to our Embassy sauna to experience a real Finnish way of doing diplomacy. With a vihta made of our front yard's birch twigs, we headed to the 80C sauna room. It may have struck the ladies as an odd idea - go to the sauna in the middle of a working day?! Keen for new experiences and extremely open minded any hesitation was quickly shrugged off. We discussed the health benefits and the meaning of sauna, using sauna as a tool for country branding in Finland and overall cultural differences between Finns and Australians. After a few löyly we felt relaxed and inspired and it was time to move on to the next task.

Ambassador Lars Backström and Ambassador-for-a-day Kaitlin.

Kaitlin and Shaylah interviewed our new Deputy Head of Mission, Katja Karppinen. With Katja, they talked about female leaders in foreign service, the importance of knowing languages and what career in diplomacy could actually be like. Because our Ambassador, Lars Backström, was away that day, our new diplomats were unable to interview him during the day. Nevertheless, a suitable date for an interview was found in November, and Lars got to answer questions about the Finnish education system, Finnish innovations related to sustainability, and of course about the world of diplomacy.

Kaitlin and Shaylah sharing their experiences with other participants.

To conclude the day, there was a reception held in our embassy's concert hall. Girls from participating embassies gathered together to share their experiences of their day as diplomats and to listen to speeches from organisers and about the girl empowerment movement.

Days such as Girls Takeover play a significant role in promoting all the possibilities there are for girls. It is also beneficial for the organizations and working communities to receive lots of fresh ideas and energy and to see our daily work from a different perspective. Hopefully, the day was as inspiring to every participator as it was to our Embassy, we learned a lot from Kaitlin and Shaylah!