THE CITY OF YOUTH

In Tartu for 100 000 citizens nearly 33 000 are young people. From them 16 000 are school children, 13 000 university students and 2000 studying at vocational schools. So we get about 50 000 youngsters, who besides family life, school and work wish to develop and experiment themselves.

The City Council's youth service supports youth initiation, and if necessary advises young people in their activities. Our goal is to make young people's needs, suggestions and opinions heard in city council and government, so that they could create favourable conditions for youth development and initiation.

The Council's youth service has worked for 6 years. It is one of the best working services in Estonia. The youth initiation and activity is increasing. co-operation between different groups is working and hopefully the creation of Tartu Youth Council will speed this trend, as now young people participate in city council financial support distributing process.

Youth festival "Pulss" which took place last summer, will be held also this year from 29-30 June. We wish that "Pulss" would become the no. 1 youth festival in Tartu. Very popular among youth is also the street rave party "Streetrave" in the end of August. This event has gathered different opinions among older people -from really negative to positive because of the style and loudness of the music, but we consider that one night a year it is permissible.

A new idea, which found support, was information fair "Start fever", which was organized by young people and offered information about possible free time activities in Tartu's clubs, sport schools, organizations. Youth department also organizes project management training courses for young people, so that they could realize their good and interesting ideas.

Every summer there are several youngsters who have to spend their summer at town. A big event, which is coming this summer, is the project "Bears summer", which offers several training, competitions. With that we hope to prevent youth from drug and alcohol use.

There is much more to tell about Tartu youth activities, like a youth workers cooperation network. Therefore we leave our contact details and say "WELCOME" to all, who are interested in Tartu youth activities and want to co-operate with us.