“Improving communication with migrants for crisis preparedness in Finland: Lessons learned from COVID-19”

In a multicultural and multilingual society, effective intercultural communication is key to the inclusion and social participation of communities with low command of the official language. The COVID-19 health crisis proved that failure to reach all groups in society impacts whole countries negatively. However, little research attention has been paid to intercultural crisis communication to open up new paths and solutions. The present study was developed in response to this need and is an output of the project “Improving Communication with Migrants for Crisis Preparedness: Lessons Learned From COVID-19”, which was carried out by researchers in three countries, namely Estonia, Finland and Latvia. Its aim is to suggest rapid-response crisis communication strategies for delivering information to linguistic minorities during emergencies. Furthermore, due to this study’s transnational nature, it seeks to strengthen cooperation between the states of the Baltic Sea Region in dealing with cross-border emergencies and find ways to use the knowledge generated by this cooperation to address problems at the local/state level.