The youth center of Rauna Municipality is founded 9 years ago. The aim of it was to provide young people the space where they can spend their leisure time meaningfully, to organize thematic afternoons, to participate at projects. Young people from 12 – 20 y.o. attended the center. But as they grow up and generations were changing, only children started to visit the Basement. Some of them attended the activities but mostly center existed as a room for leisure time. The leader of the youth center Justine Bulina started to build the strategy to fix the situation and involve also young people in youth center space. At the moment, the youth center invites children and young people for thematic afternoons, dance classes, visual art activities, exchanging thoughts afternoons, spending free time individually and is facilitated by two youth workers. Youth work in municipality is organized with non formal education tools. In cooperation with young people in schools a number of nonformal education programmes has been proposed to help young people to become a person who is brave, communicative and open to the world. Working with young people in a small village we come to the conclusion that the youth center is where young people are, so we found ways of working with the school for young people. Strategic priorities now is to work with children as they are becomming young people and to support young people in their development as they are becomming Rauna’s inhabitants. We want to introduce learning and self development as a joyfull and creative process.
Rauna Municipality consists of two communities: Rauna and Drusti, total area of the region is 3019 km2 with 3690 inhabitants. Rauna municipality provides all statutory services-educational institutions, social care, utilities, territory improvement, development of cultural values, civil status registration, child protection. Some local government functions we are joined together with neighboring municipalities- educational system management, framework of construction process, waste management, provide transportation services.
Video link to how young people see Rauna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2F_WCOOM8k&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR35UpxKi5kmh23wjqFl2Rpc97b3bmC0ie8_O6iqR7TQstNRno_ijOsykR4
Photos from a Month of Good Deeds:
Participants at tKtC:
Justīne Buliņa, a leader of Youth center. She developing a Youth Policy Strategy, shee has obtained certificates as a Specialist of youth affairs, Edinburgh Duke’s International Youth Self-Education Program AWARD. Young people, culture, and other things in a small area are connected, and Justine raises young people’s volunteer work by involving young people in cultural / sporting events, generating ideas and performing them. Justine makes it possible to create digital-looking posters, as well as to film and assemble videos to address young people both for voluntary youth movement and for young people.
Ieva Grundsteine is an invited expert of Rauna Municipality for tKtC. She has been working in the youth field since 2001 and last 9 years is an active trainer of non-formal learning in the field of youth – as a local and European project initiator and manager. She has carried already more than 100 international trainings for different target groups (youth workers, teachers and others). Ieva is involved in regular contemporary dance exercises as a learner (hobby-level) since 4 years and has applied kinesthetic learning in her training several times. She is a member of pool of trainers of Latvian NA.
The project financed by the Erasmus + Programme, which for years has been the leading program of the European Commission supporting educational activities in a form that is limited only by imagination, so if someone would like to try their hand at obtaining a grant for unusual international projects, they should definitely look at the website of the www.erasmusplus.org.pl
