WHAT I DO AS A VOLUNTEER STRATEGY INTERN AT LAHTI SKI GAMES

It all started with a message to Tomi-Pekka Kolu (CEO at Lahti Ski Games) and a phone call to Tami Kiuru (Competition Manager at Lahti Ski Games).

Since then I was assign to be responsible for volunteer marketing, onboarding and training strategy.

INTERNSHIP DURATION:
DEC 2025 - FEB 2026

I design the volunteer recruitment and onboarding strategy for Lahti Ski Games 2026 with a view towards the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 2029 in Lahti, focusing especially on:

• attracting more international and student volunteers
• building long‑term volunteer relationships

My work starts from mapping the full volunteer journey from the first application through onboarding, training, shift communication and post‑event feedback, and turning this into a clear, repeatable process the organization can re‑use and scale in the coming years.

I create and refine English‑language content for the volunteer page, FAQ and email flows so that non‑Finnish speaking volunteers can easily understand roles, schedules, benefits and practical details, and I benchmark how world‑class events such as Slush, World Cups and World Championships run their volunteer programs by interviewing their volunteer managers and translating those insights into concrete experiments for Lahti.

Through this role, the main skills developed are volunteer strategy and service design, international communications and stakeholder management at a World Cup‑level event.

The work clearly shows and teaches how to design an end‑to‑end experience for hundreds of volunteers, how to communicate clearly in English for a primarily Finnish event so that international volunteers feel confident to join, and how to align ideas and experiments with the timelines and constraints of senior event leaders while keeping a long‑term perspective towards Lahti 2029.