Due to the economical declaim in Latvia, many orphanages where closed down at 2007 and all the children disseminated to other orphanages or sent home. Without the guidance of beloved teachers and social workers, they ended up in jail and in the drug/alcohol rehabilitation centers. This experience inspired 3 friends to make the organization which would assist young disadvantaged people in their decisions, because it is very easy in the age of 14-20 to make irreversible mistakes, which would affect you for all your life.
On March, 2008 we established the organization “Jaunatne par iesaistisanos” (Youth for involvement) with the fallowing goals:
- To involve young socially marginalized people such as orphans, youngsters with behavior and drug addiction problems, representatives from national minorities, inhabitants of the rural areas, physically or mentally challenged young persons into society;
- To provide necessary training to improve social skills and the level of education
- · To promote healthy and socially active lifestyle;
Now we are working actively on information campaign in cooperation with State Employment Agency, State Probation Service and The Social Service Department of Cesis City Council. Our organization
is lead by the board, which consists of 3 board members. Sarma Brauna, Gatis Petersons and Kaspars Vins. We have an office consisting of 5 paid staff members Sarma Brauna – director, Adina Berovska – financial director, Sandis Stepanovs – youth worker, Robert Patersons – youth worker, Andris Sivins – Public relations specialist, Aivars Bambis – technical official and 5 active volunteers Sandis Lidums, Kaspars Viksnitis, Kristaps Dvorniks, Ieva Tirne, Aiga Staškeviča.
We have a Creativity room in the biggest shopping center Globuss, where we organize the drawing contests and workshops for children and the information day for the young people who want to become volunteers.
These are the places where young people could meet informally with our ex-volunteers and get to know more about the possibilities for the young people to learn, work and spend free time in Cesis, in Latvia and in Europe. It is much easier for disadvantaged youngsters to come in to cafe or to the shopping center, than to come to our office, because office is too formal for them. We welcome the youngsters without age limit. It is very important, because there are quite few places, where 13-17 young people could go and meet each other. We plan to involve young artists and musicians who need a place to perform and exhibit their works.
In addition to our paid staff, our organization has 10-15 active members, who are mostly ex volunteers – coming from rural areas, members of national minorities of Latvia(Russians, Lithuanians and Jewish), former drug and alcohol addicts after rehabilitation, people with former behavior problems, orphans and former inmates. With our personal example we demonstrate that every problem has a solution, sometimes you just have to admit it and not to be afraid to ask for others to help.
We organize regular information campaigns for socially marginalized youth in State Employment Agency and in The State Probation Service on topics such as: Socially active citizenship, Healthy and active lifestyle, and Program “Youth in Action”. We spread out the written information about our organization and other friendly organizations, young person would be interested in.
We organize information campaigns about “Youth in action” in schools during the school year.
