The Youth House – the house that built the community

08 September 2026

Figure 1. Konrad Hauge and Robin Rist in front of the youth house at Sand, an important meeting place for the local community (Photo: Elin Tinuviel Torbergsen).

The story is based on an audio recording with Konrad Hauge, Robin Rist and Anton Rist, made on July 22, 2026. The recording has been transcribed and adapted into a storytelling by Elin Tinuviel Torbergsen.

Before “community hall” became a common word in official documents, the houses were already out there in the villages. They were erected by people who needed a place to meet. Inside the walls, there was discussion and dancing, lending books, arranging Christmas parties and holding meetings. Here, weddings were celebrated, young people learned to speak, and local musicians were given a stage to stand on.

But the villagers did not call them community halls.

They called them youth houses.

Konrad Hauge from the youth team in Laukvik tells the story together with the brothers Robin and Anton Rist from Sand. Their memories take us back to the interwar period, when the youth team movement had already gained a foothold in the villages.

When the word community house is mentioned, Konrad reacts.

The village people know little about the word community hall.

For him, the term belongs to a later time. Out in the villages, people had already erected the houses themselves, and they themselves raised the money needed to keep them in operation. Much of the income came from dance parties, bazaars, food service and lottery sales.

The history of these houses is therefore about far more than buildings.

A school in speaking up

Robin pulls out an old photograph. There’s his father.

The picture takes the conversation back in time, to Reidar Olaussen, a man who left a deep mark on his youth team work. Olaussen died of tuberculosis before the war, but managed to help build up the Youth Association Club according to a clear idea: The young people should not only have a place where they could meet and have fun.

They were going to learn something.

They were to learn how a meeting was conducted. How a moderator led an assembly. How to listen when others spoke, and how to stand up and speak.

Konrad has a word for it:

Public Education

Through statutes, meetings and fixed rules, the young people learned how to participate in an organized community. The youth house should be a place of order, but also a place of learning.

In the 1930s, the young people in Laukvik met for discussion evenings. One of the questions Konrad remembers was:

“Who creates the most cosiness in the home? The man or the woman?”

A question that was perhaps less important than what happened around it. The young people learned to formulate an opinion, stand up in front of others, argue for what they meant, and listen when someone thought the opposite.

Standing up in front of an audience is a threshold.

You learned to get over that threshold at the Youth Association Club.

The meetings continued all the way into the 1990s. The organization had annual meetings, accounts and elections.

Roles had to be filled. Decisions had to be made. The accounts had to be correct.

In this way, the youth house became a small school in organizational life and democracy.

Public education also took place through books. In Laukvik, the Youth Association had its own library. At a time when school libraries hardly existed, book boxes were passed between people in the village. Books were loaned, read and passed on.

Through the books, meetings and discussions, the Youth Association Club tried, as Konrad describes it, “to raise the culture”.

When the village gathered

But the youth house was not just minutes of meetings, statutes and discussions.

It was also full of people.

Robin, who was born in 1957, remembers Christmas Day in particular. The day could begin in church. Afterwards, his father had to go home to the farm and into the barn. The animals waited no matter what day the calendar showed.

At four o’clock, the children’s party began at the youth center in Sand.

And when the evening came, there was a dance party.

Inside the house was a large black stove. It had to be fired up long before people arrived. Then the house filled up.

Anton remembers the Christmas tree in the middle of the floor. Three and four rows of people could walk around the tree at the same time.

It was fantastic to see.

The children’s parties at Christmas and on 17 May were among the big events. For the children, the youth house was a place where the holidays took shape: the Christmas tree in the middle of the room, hot chocolate from the kitchen, people close together and the expectation that something would happen.

When the light came

In 1954, electricity arrived.

The poles were erected the same year, and when the power reached the youth house, a festival of lights was arranged.

There are photographs from the evening. People are sitting at a long table inside the house, on prayer house benches without backs. Before the power came, the house had been lit by oil lamps and petromax lamps.

Now you could turn on electric lights.

The house itself was simple.

But it was their house.

And it was full of life.

Figures 4 and 5. The “Festival of Lights” in the autumn of 1954, when the village marked that electricity had arrived at the youth house. For the first time, the electric lamps could be lit. It is difficult today to imagine how big an event this must have been for the village. Photo from Robin Rist’s photo album.

Party, music and meetings between the villages

The dance parties were both social meeting places and an important source of income for the Youth Association Club.

During Christmas, the dances followed an almost fixed circuit from village to village. There might be a dance at Sand on the second day of Christmas, at Strønstad on the third, at Laupstad on the fourth, and at Laukvik on the fifth.

The young people went from house to house and from party to party.

Dance linked the villages together. Between 1970 and the time when the parties disappeared, there were about ten different bands in Laukvik alone. The musicians traveled between the youth houses and played, often American cover songs and Swedish music.

Of course, the youth house had a stage.

There had to be a stage.

At Christmas, there was entertainment, and at times revues were staged both at Sand and in Laukvik. The house was thus not just a place where culture was showcased. It was a place where local culture was created.

hot chocolate, meat roll and large pots

Food was included.

On 17 May and the Christmas parties, people brought their own food for a long time. Konrad remembers the box of meat rolls and the slices of bread. The hot chocolate was cooked in the kitchen.

But the kitchen was also a workplace.

Robin and Konrad remember the women who stood in there when large amounts of food were to be prepared.

We must highlight the women who cooked here.

Behind the humor in the memories lies an important reality. It took enormous amounts of work to serve food to a hundred people, and sometimes far more.

The work in the kitchen was part of the collective work that made the youth house possible.

Wedding for 120 guests

The youth houses were also wedding venues.

At Sand, the church was so close that it was natural to walk from the wedding ceremony straight to the youth house to celebrate.

Konrad remembers a wedding in 1964 where they didn’t have enough cups and plates. The solution was to go to the store and borrow what they were missing. After the wedding, everything was washed and put back on the store shelves.

When Konrad himself got married in 1977, he had 120 guests.

His father slaughtered a young sheep. The women of the village roasted the meat and made brown gravy. At weddings, traditional dishes such as fårikål (mutton and cabbage stew), lapskaus (meat and vegetable stew), or småsteik (small pieces of roasted meat served with gravy) might be served. Prune pudding with cream was a common dessert.

A wedding for 120 people required food, knowledge, equipment and work.

But the resources were in the community.

Food, work and season

At the end of the 1960s, sausage parties appeared. These parties were also dependent on the local community. The farmers in the area contributed meat and potatoes. The meat was delivered to the slaughterhouse in Sortland, which at the time was run by the Northern Norway Sales Association (NNS), and from there the sausages were sent back to the village. At the parties, boxes of sausages arrived, ready to be served to the many who gathered at the Youth Association Club.

The parties were often arranged in the autumn.

The summer was busy. Then there was work to be done. When autumn came and the pace slowed down, people could gather again.

In this way, food, work, season and social life were connected.

Music also had an important place in rural life. In Laukvik there was an active brass band that rehearsed at school. At the youth house, the band played during bazaars, among other things. The brass band eventually developed into one of Norway’s best amateur bands and also participated in connection with the king’s visit to Belgium.

It was an infrastructure for the village.

The houses that the people own

The income came from bazaars, dance parties, food service and lottery sales.

Money went back to the house.

At Sand, the house has been refurbished, partly with the help of income from market days in the autumn. Locals come to sell goods. Coffee and soft drinks are sold. People buy lottery tickets.

Robin points to something he believes is absolutely crucial:

These houses are owned by the people themselves.

Konrad emphasizes the same. The youth houses were erected and run by local teams and managed largely through local resources and volunteer work.

Thus, the house was not the municipality’s.

It was not the state’s.

It belonged to the local community.

Today, the situation differs from place to place. Some of the houses have been restored and are still in use. Others have been given new functions or are in danger of disappearing. The Youth Association Club are mostly gone, and other teams have taken over much of the responsibility.

At Sand, they are still trying to keep the house alive.

When the meeting places disappear

When Konrad looks back, however, it is not only the buildings that he is interested in.

It’s what happened between the people inside them.

Many of the dance parties are gone. The stages where local bands could play have lost much of their function. The arenas where young people learned to dance, discuss, organise and be together no longer exist in the same way.

It’s a shame,” says Konrad.

Because the youth house gathered many different parts of village life under one roof.

People met here.

They danced.

Organized events.

Played in bands and stood on stage.

Learned to discuss and speak.

They boiled chocolate, cooked for a hundred people, carried benches, sold lottery tickets, fired up the oven and washed borrowed plates before they were put back on the store shelf.

Through bazaars and dance parties, the villagers raised money for the house. Through voluntary work, they kept it alive. Within the walls, new generations learned how to organize a meeting, keep accounts, elect a board, argue for an opinion and listen to others.

Therefore, the history of the youth houses is about more than old buildings.

It is about how a local community created and maintained its own meeting place through knowledge, work, food, music, stories and togetherness.

The black stove that had to be lit up before the party. A Christmas tree with three and four rings of people around it. The petromax lamps before the electricity came. Women at the big pots in the kitchen. The young people who went from village to village in search of the next dance.

These are not just memories of a house.

There are memories of the practices that made the house come alive.

The youth house was a party venue and library, wedding hall, meeting place and stage.

But perhaps most important of all.

It was the village’s own school in culture, community and democracy.