Vibrant Villages

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Village Action Committees sprang up during the '70s and '80s, offering new hope for rural Finland. Drawing on the power of talkoot, villages' strong tradition of voluntary community labor, the committees went to work creating economic opportunities, increasing political influence and enhancing community spirit and self-confidence.

Pietila notes that committees have not only worked hard to improve their communities' infrastructure--roads, buildings, sports grounds--but have also recorded and restored the cultural heritage of rural regions by recording local traditions and reviving convivial customs. The Village Action movement understands that it is not just jobs and good roads that make villages attractive places to live, but also cultural activities, a sense of tradition, and feelings of community.

There are now 3,000 village committees throughout Finland, up from 1,000 in 1979, when the Ramsoo committee was founded. Probably half the villages in the country are now represented by a committee, and the committees are beginning to work together in regional and national coalitions. They are a prime example of what Czech writer and president V?clav Havel and others call 'civil society'--they have no links to government agencies and run on an informal basis.

'The social structure of Finland would be significantly different today without this movement,' Pietila writes. 'The Village Action movement has been able to slow down the migration of people from villages and it has also created a return flow to the villages, which not only compensates for the outflow but steadily increases the population in many villages.' Forty thousand more Finns moved to villages from cities during the '80s and early '90s than moved to cities from villages, notes Tapio Mattlar, a committee leader who moved to his village from Helsinki.

Pietila adds that the Village Action movement is 'the only major movement of villagers and rural people in an industrialized country to have emerged as a reaction to the kind of development that implies deprivation of rural life.' Because of its example to the whole world, the Finnish Village Action movement was awarded a Right Livelihood Award, the 'alternative Nobel prize,' in 1992.

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