Descrição da organização

Youth department of Daugavpils city council was established in 2011. Every day we deal with issues and problems connected with youth in Daugavpils, second largest development center of national significance in Latvia. Our mission is to support 13-25 years old citizens in their personal development process guiding them through this stage of life, offering various opportunities of expressing themselves, and mentoring and supporting them during this period!

Our main aim is to take care about young people, implementing youth policy initiatives proposed by local authorities and governmental institutions at a local level, in order to create youth-friendly environment. You can find the full list of functions and tasks transferred to our team according to regulations of Youth Department of Daugavpils city council following the link below:
https://www.daugavpils.lv/pasvaldiba/daugavpils-pilsetas-dome/domes-struktura/jaunatnes-nodala

Daugavpils is the second largest city in Latvia and a great example of multinational cooperation and multi-confessional good-neighbourhood inside the city. Due to its location, our city has historically developed as a regional education, culture and economic centre, and has a great experience of international cooperation too!

During the ast 15 years lots of young people from Daugavpils graduating school have imigrated to capital city and into other EU memeberstates looking for various educational opportunities or for a job, but in the same time there are many young people still living in Daugavpils, including youngsters who connect their future with native city. Our target audience according to official statistics (2019) reaches 9419 young people, that is 11% of all city inhabitants.

Youth non-formal education center and cooperation with NGOs

There are 195 NGOs working with youth in our city and had cooperation with municipality, and some of them are merged together under one roof of Youth Department in Youth non-formal education center. They are very active and do support the events and projects or our department. The majority of these organizations involve volunteers (also with further opportunities and disabilities) in their activities supporting youth initiatives.

Events

Every year our team organizes more than 50 events and projects for young people in order offer an opportunity for young people to meet leaders of view, local entrepreneurs, representatives of government and just different young people, representatives of NGOs and educational establishments, etc. Making contacts and sharing ideas through non-formal methods is the very basics of sustainable community of young citizens! This is the way of how to involve young people in volunteering activities and how to motivate young people for personal and professional development too. Our biggest event is youth festival “Artišoks”. Usually it is collects more than 40 NGOs and several thousands of participants!

Summer camps

There are up to 20 (19 in 2019) summer camps for children and youngsters between 6 and 19 years old organized by City Council in cooperation with schools in the city every summer season. Our team is responsible for dissemination of information and youth registration, looking the most suitable option for exact child, his interests, his age, preferable location and time period, and additional attention is paid to children from large families. Every year up to 900 (880 in 2019) people use this opportunity.

Youth employment program

Daugavpils City council in cooperation with municipal institutions and establishments offers the opportunity of summer work for youth between 13 and 19 years old. This opportunity is availiable for young people declared in Daugavpils who study in schools, universities and vocational educational establishments during their holidays. This is a great opportunity to get first working experience and earn some money. This employment program is very popular among youth in our city, and in 2019 there were 2607 participants.

In summer 2018 we have attracted financial support of the Ministry of Education and Science of Latvia for Daugavpils city council Youth policy planning document creation in order to organize an effective work with youth during 2019 – 2022, and it was prepared, but unfortunately wasn’t implemented, and at the moment the hard work on this topic is resumed, in order to establish effective communication and perspective cooperation the intuitions involved in youth policy implementation at a local level, because only working together we can gain a good result – create youth-friendly environment!

In the same time adopting the experience of our partners (submitting this application) we have taken a step forward to Solidarity Corps activities, that would expand our opportunities to cooperate with European volunteers, who could invest their time and ideas to refresh local youth community and involve more young people into local and international events and projects!