Hi, my name is Jamie and I’m the founder of Helsinki Friends. I started this community three years ago and I would like to tell you how it all started.
I moved from Scotland to Finland in 2017. I got a great work opportunity but honestly I did not plan to stay here permanently. It is cliche but life happened and I met a Finnish woman and fell in love. I knew right then that there was no looking back. I was getting used to life in Finland and even becoming to love the culture but the more time went by I started to feel lonely as I did not have any friends here and could not come up with ideas to find any. The older you get the more difficult it is to meet new people and make new friends. So I started to think about solutions – I posted on a couple of Facebook groups to find like-minded people to meet up and do something fun together, even just have a chat. Unfortunately this did not seem to work.
I suddenly got an idea: why not create a WhatsApp group? This is exactly what I did. I then posted the link on Facebook with the hope people would join. After a few days we already had about 20 people in the group and arranged a Meetup on a Thursday at Esplanadi in Helsinki. It was summer time and just had a lot of fun, we had people from all kinds of backgrounds coming in and it was a blast!
Weeks went by and we got more and more people joining our WhatsApp group – that is when I decided to name it Helsinki Friends. We kept organising different meetups and met up to attend different events together, everything from BBQ-s to day trips to cities and islands.
Fast forward a year later we faced a problem – WhatsApp was limiting for us and we moved over to Telegram. At the same time we created the Facebook group where we have an impressing 3.6K following at the moment.
We have a general chat on Telegram and also a lot of sub-chats where people can communicate and organise events and activities or just talk about hobbies. There are groups from anything like salsa dancing and hiking to chess and programming. We also hold a weekly meet-up at bar Kraken in the centre of Helsinki. Everyone is welcome to either have a refreshing drink and enjoy the scene or just have a nice chat and meet new people.
We are constantly striving to build our community and work with businesses in and around Helsinki to offer even more fun events and greater benefits for the community.
This is the story of Helsinki Friends. I want to thank everyone who has been along on this journey with us and welcome to everyone new – let’s make it an even greater one!