European Voluntary Service in Liepaja

For the last three years Liepaja has been one of the active cities within the Baltic Sea Region when it comes to European Voluntary Service (EVS). EVS is a part of the European Youth Programme and is open to youth between 18 and 25. It allows a young person to work as a volunteer in another country for up to twelve months.

Currently Liepaja is hosting five volunteers from all over Europe and is expecting two more to come in April. Liepaja Youth Centre, which is the coordinating organisation for all EVS activities in Liepaja, sends out approximately ten volunteers per year. This number is still increasing.

Damien Ridelle from Belgium, who is a volunteer at Liepaja Boarding School, says: "After seeing a documentary about the Baltic States I was very eager to visit these dynamic countries. Doing EVS in Liepaja is a great opportunity for me to see this city evolving." The Italian volunteer Andrea Suglia agrees: "The future of Europe lies here!" To improve the quality of its EVS projects, Liepaja Youth centre is involved in a new project called "EVS in the Baltic Sea Region". The aim of this project is to enlarge cooperation between cities within the BSR. This will be realised by strengthening bonds between EVS organisations, i.a. trough training courses. "EVS in the BSR" is initiated by Kumulus, a resource centre for local and regional youth policy in Kalmar, in cooperation with UBC Commission on Youth Issues. Liepsja is very active also in other youth programmes. For instance in August there will be an international youth exchange between Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. The main topic of this exchange will be EU citizenship.

Liepaja is the first city in Latvia which develops the local youth policy. We expect it to be accepted by the Liepaja City Council this year. In September Liepaja will host the meeting of the Commission on Youth Issues.