INTEGRATION WORK

Since its historical establishment and developing as a "closed town", Sillamäe used to have very special resources, thus there was industry, resulting in a special social regime in the former time. Due to a fast and highly developing industry during Soviet time there was shaped a very special population content: technical intellectuals, well educated engineers, teachers, doctors and many other specialists from different regions of Russia. Nowadays Sillamäe has the highest rate of non-Estonian people comparing to other Estonian cities.

These features make some special priorities in the field of youth work. There is quite much work done on the issues of integration. We are making our best to find new partners for youth work, establish new links and contacts between youth and organizations from different regions of Estonia. There are many projects providing exchanges of pupils of regular and vocational schools, we organize many different camps in several parts of Estonia, where besides formal Estonian language courses youngsters have perfect possibilities for informal communication.

Evaluating this study-visit both sides found that there are a lot of ways for further co-operation, and especially in the field of youth work.

The municipality has undertaken one more dimension in the youth work: prevention of drug addiction. A sudden increase in drug users, especially among youth, and HIV infected people raised a demand of a special program directed towards prevention of drug and developing better sport and healthy traditions.

There are many youth NGOs working in the town, that concern many different areas of social and youth work, such as ecology, social work, politics, education, sports, arts etc. The largest and the most active youth NGO is Organization on Support of Youth Initiatives - ESN, that involves hundreds young people into its' activities.