ESN Latvia
written by
Jekaterina Pruceva
»» Date of first section established in the country: 2001 »» Date of inclusion in ESN International: CNR Vilnius, 2003 »» Creation of National Board: 2015 »» Number of sections 2015: 3
ESN Riga was established in 2003. That means that in September 2013 ESN Riga celebrated its 10th Birthday! Firstly, the section was registered with an initial legal name “ESN Latvia” but later was renamed into ESN Riga. ESN Riga has started from two independent organizations. Early in its development, ESN Latvia merged with another international student focused organization from the University of Latvia. By the end of 2003 ESN Latvia was very active in both organizing local activities and taking part in international meetings and initiatives of ESN. After one year of operation, ESN Riga had grown to team of ten people with a good coordination and well-functioning buddy system. 2005 was the time for ESN Riga to go international; this year ESN Riga organized an ESN International Board meeting in Riga. Later that year, a delegation of five people attended the AGM Gdansk where ESN Riga member and cofounder was elected as the Treasurer of ESN International.
promoting youth mobility in Europe. ESN Riga carried out different projects – Give 20 fundraising project for children education and wellbeing in Bhutan, PRIME, ExchangeAbility. Another success story was SocialErasmus project started in 2011. Now both sections – ESN Riga and ESN Jelgava are implementing different ESN projects – Mov’in Europe, ESNSurvey, ESNcard, Responsible Party and others. During the semester both sections – ESN Riga and ESN Jelgava – organize a lot of different activities. Every semester starts with an Introduction week. All the activities during this week are aimed to help students to get to know each other, to introduce our beautiful cities and of course to have fun! Every semester ESN sections organize various trips. These are trips to different regions of Latvia, trip to our lovely neighbor countries Lithuania (Vilnius, Kaunas, Trakai) and Estonia (Tallinn, Tartu). Every semester around 100 exchange students from Latvia participate in a Tallinn – Stockholm trip a.k.a. ESN Sea Battle. For the first time ESN Sea Battle spring’14 was from Riga. Our St.Petersburg trips are very popular among students; during this 4 day trip students visit the most exciting places of Cultural Capital of Russia. First time exchange students from Latvia went to ROCK the Lapland in December 2012 and now it is one of favorite trips.
Latvia
/ˈlætviə/; Latvian: Latvija IPA: [ˈlatvija]
Since AGM Milano 2014 we have 2 ESN sections in Latvia and looking forward to welcome new sections to our network!
ESN Jelgava gained candidate section status after 10 years of ESN existence in Latvia. The vote of full membership took place at the pre-AGM Milano CNR, it was approved and ESN Jelgava became 2nd ESN section in Latvia. ESN Riga is a full member in the National Youth Council of Latvia. Youth Council highly valued ESN experience
70 | HB 2014