Greetings!

Our centre opened on March 19, 1995, with the implementing financial assistance of the External Affairs CANADA Baltic Initiatives Program and the Canadian Lithuanian Catholic Centre. However, funding has since ceased. We began as a Social Services Center for Youth and Women, but because of translation problems with that name, we are now known as "Dvasines Pagalbos Jaunimui Centras" (DPJC). In English this means, Spiritual Guidance Center for Youth.

We are a nonprofit, social service organisation, depending upon charitable organizations to help finance our work and to sustain our activities in the future. We started with individual counseling (no charge), which has lead to peer-support group therapy. However, the current needs of the local area called for more attention to be focused on children from "dysfunctional" families (mainly due to alcoholism) and we successfully managed a Summer Day Camp/Activity Center, in which a total of 145 children (half from dysfunctional families and the other half from "normal" families) from the local region participated.

About 60 volunteers served as group leaders and activity specialists. These were university students (who lacked practical application skills), high school students from the local church (who lacked skills that require theoretical knowledge, but had fantastic interpersonal skills), teachers, artists and others. The overall results were very positive, but we feel we failed in not having leaders and specialists to work with these kids.

DPJC is now redirecting its focus to train youth in working with children from dysfunctional families, while at the same time helping them solve their own problems through therapy sessions. Therefore, DPJC is looking for qualified psychologists, social workers, counselors and/or other specialists who could conduct intensive training sessions to teach others how to work with children from dysfunctional families.

Our goal is to run Summer Activity Centers throughout the whole city in 1996, and to continue follow-up centers during the school year. Our recruitment of volunteer leaders will begin in December, with training beginning shortly thereafter.

We would be grateful for the servi-ces of volunteers who would also be able to finance their own travel. Currently, most of our attempts at fund-raising at the local level have failed due to very hard economic times in Lithuania, and raising funds from abroad requires a long time. We continue to look for possible charitable organizations, filling in copious amounts of application forms, but thus far few positive results but then again, no negative results.

If you need more information or are able to meet some of our needs, please contact us by writing, telephone, fax, or even better, e-mail.

Thanks for your time and help!

Richard Liskauskas
Dvasines Pagalbos Jaunimui Centras
27 Smilteles
5815 Klaipeda
LITHUANIA
Tel: (370-6) 360-411
Fax: (370-6) 360-412
E-mail:[email protected]

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The URL for this page is: http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~ccsi/csew/95-10/lithlet.htm
Last updated: March 26 1996

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