A couple of months ago, I made a post about my relationship to minority politics that could have been regarded as a closure of a chapter. Well, it was, but a new chapter opened sooner than I expected, as I was elected to the board of the Sweden-Finnish Delegation, which is the national umbrella organization of Sweden-Finnish associations, networks and communities.

The Delegation is a non-partisan organization with headquarters at Bellmansgatan in Stockholm. The members of the new presidium do not represent their affiliations – that include, among other things, the national confederation Sverigefinska riksförbundet RSKL and the Swedish Church – but work together to identify and monitor the common interests of the national minority Sweden-Finns.

The national minority covers Sweden-Finns (sverigefinnar), but the scope of the Delegation also includes the minority of Forest Finns (skogsfinnar) who are mostly Swedish-speaking Sweden-Finns and Finland-Swedes (finlandssvenskar) residing in Sweden who have the Finnish variant of Swedish as their mother tongue and who are not Sweden-Finns but share common interests in the Finnish culture with Sweden-Finns. Accordingly, the term used in the Delegation’s name is sverigefinländare, which encompasses all these groups living in Sweden.

Above you can find a link to a Facebook post where we answered to questions on today’s Sweden-Finnishness, sent to us by upper secondary school students from Stockholm. That was, in fact, the first concrete task that I did in my role as a delegate in the presidium – after acting as a chair at the year’s plenum, of course.

There are a number of initiatives to come, so – as said – minority politics will, after all, stay on my agenda for the months to come.