PROJECT ENVIRONMENT
Geographically Kaunas is the second largest city in Lithuania and the fourth in the Baltic States. It is 100 km away from the capital Vilnius and about 300 km away from the seaside. The population in Kaunas is about 415.800 inhabitants. Ethnic composition: 80% Lithuanian, 8,8% Russian, 0,7% Belarusian, 0,7% Ukrainian, 0,6% Polish, 0,1% Latvian, 1,5% others.

Kaunas was a temporary capital of Lithuania between the world wars, so it is still one of the cultural and economical centres. There're 8 universities, a lot of museums, six theatres in Kaunas.
Two biggest rivers of Lithuania meet in the city centre, that's why there's a beautiful park there, where you can have a walk accompanied by Nemunas (the river father) and Neris (the river mother).

The youth centre "Vartai" is located in the old part of the town. This means on one hand, that the volunteer will work in a very international and active region. On the other hand city centre means, that many young people come here to spend their leisure time. Through the activities of the youth centre we try to provide young people with a safe space, where they can spend their leisure time with less risk of violence, drug abuse or harassment, having a place to use their energy in a creative and conscious direction. Lack of safe place for the young people we see as an important social problem. There are plenty of clubs, where the consume of alcohol and drugs is not controlled, as well as nearly no institution makes an effort to help young people reinforcing and accepting every young person.

ACTIVITIES
We can offer for the volunteer:
- We see it as very important to offer the volunteer an intensive, available and regular accompanying. Concrete we understand this as regular meeting for the reflection, where both, the tutor and the volunteer can evaluate the working process. The tutor has been working with the EVS volunteers for five years, so she gained different experiences in the process of changing cultures and living environment.
- We can offer friendly and open minded team of young people. The motivating and fair work atmosphere we see as a necessary condition for a productive work.
- A possibility to learn the language. The workers of the youth centre can easily communicate in English, German and Russian, that may be useful for the volunteer in the beginning. Later on we expect that the volunteer will improve the skills of Lithuanian language. We are ready to accompany and support this process.
- Apart from the language the volunteer will gain team skills, skills in planning, organizing different events, evaluating, leading and certain skills from different workshops.
- We can offer both ways of working: to go solo and with accompanying though the workers. Working solo can be a challenging experience. As well the volunteer will have space to sell his or her own ideas, as the activities in the youth centre are not strong restricted.
- If the volunteer is interested in the cultural differences, he or she will have an opportunity to gain a view into the reality of the youth situation in Lithuania, the topics and values, which young people are interested in.

In the following we will describe the tasks, which may better explain the role of the volunteer in our project. The role has two characters: the assistance of the activities, which come from the other people or embodying of the own ideas, which the volunteer may have.

The tasks would be:
- Participation in the staff meetings, where the accomplished activities will be evaluated the further ones planned. In these meetings we share the tasks, reflect personal situations in the project and discuss new opportunities (about 10 % of the time).
- Activities with the young people during the opened evenings, four days per week. During the opened evenings we sometimes have concerts or workshops, but sometimes young people just come over to have a tee, to chat or to play board games (about 60 % of the time).
- Distribution of the information about the activities of the youth centre. We try to spread information about concerts and workshops in Kaunas. It would be helpful if the volunteer would take part in this process, in form of making flyers, information booklets, handing them out in the street (about 10 % of the time).
- Preparing he space for the activities, whether it's out or inside (about 10 % of the time).
- Cooperation with other organisations and people, who somehow participate in the activities of the youth centre.

PROFILE OF VOLUNTEERS
We profile of the volunteer we would like to host:
- The main character feature of the volunteer is the motivation for the learning process. We do not identify ourselves as teachers, the main idea about this is to be able to find the positive sense in every experience. When changing the culture you get many challenging things to learn: to understand different cultural codes, the values of special group of people you deal with, how the way of thinking and the lifestyle is influenced by the material norms of the country, the language/
- It would be helpful for the project and for the volunteer, if he or she would be interested in any kind of arts, all these skills can be used in the project and quicken the integration.
- Interested in work with young people.
- It would be great, if the volunteer would read this description before coming.

To these features we will pay attention during the recruitment process. We see it as necessary to have some personal contact before the arrival via internet or phone.

SPECIAL NEEDS
Our placement is opened to host volunteers with fewer opportunities.