The youth policy of the state is a serious branch of government policy. As a politician, I believe that this is a priority direction for our country. In the agency that I have been heading since yesterday, we would like to activate this work. What do I mean? I would like the state to pay more attention to young people, and for support to increase. Apart from the state, I would like to mention society and business. I would like different sectors of economic activity, corporations, to become more active in the selection of gifted young people, in the personnel projects that the state agency for youth policy is ready to support. Here we will continue the big work that started before me and with my participation by the committee for youth policy and the parliamentary committee for youth policy where I worked for four years. For more than half a year I worked as the deputy head of the Federal Agency and worked on this question.
If we analyze the condition of this work and the attitude of the state to young people, I should say that, despite the serious changes that have taken placein the last five or six years, the situation is not ideal. And a lot remains to be done to change the situation. What objective facts force us to do so? In the next 10 years, by 2022, the number of young people, so to say those who are between 14 and 30, will decrease by 10 million. Now we have 36.5 million young people in Russia, while by 2022 there will only 25 million. In connection with the economic dynamic of the country and the 5% annual growth, I can predict that companies will be competing for young people.
In order to coordinate this competition in a civilized manner, the youth policy should already become different today regarding the support we provide for young people and organizations that help young talented people. We will also activate the work with young people in a difficult situation, all this work will be continued.
As for concrete projects, I would like to focus on the program that is being realized by the Federal Agency for Youth Policy together with the Ministry of Economic Development, the project "You are an Entrepreneur" headed by Elena Bocharova, you know a lot about it, I will not talk about it for long. Last year, thousands of new businesses started with our support and participation, and this is a serious result. There is a project "All Houses" on the housing topic. There are projects supporting volunteering organizations, including support for young journalists. We will work in these directions and organize educational programs. I have been working on educational projects for quite some time, projects devoted to the selection and preparation of young leaders in different directions, I understand this field and have a proper education, and I plan to use this experience and the available experts to make this work more effective.
I believe it is very important, this year for the first time on such a scale we will use the system of selection and work with talented young people that exists in the country. I mean the system of youth forums that took place across the country with the center at the Seliger forum. Seliger is now just a small part of this work. This year there will be more than 40 different forums in the country for young people older than 18; 8 of these forums are being supported by the Federal Agency for the first time, it is a result of our work, each federal district has a forum like that. Yesterday I attended one of them in Mordovia, where about 1500 young people brought their projects and ideas. At each of these forums we create the infrastructure to support these projects. I will pay special attention that with all the forums aimed at selecting gifted young people the infrastructure of support for this project will also develop. I believe there is still a lot to be done, despite the intensive work of the last years. There is never too many resources and it is not always possible to attract enough of them. I would like to achieve the state giving support to young gifted people in the form of grants and awards, and I am sure that the Federal Agency for the youth policy will have this possibility. Already this year we plan to support more than 1000 projects of talented young people. Many of these grants will be sent to support talented people in the regions like the North Caucasus where the attention of the state to the younger generation is very intense.
I would like to concentrate on three big groups of young people. They are divided by age. One is high school students aged between 14 and 18. Apart from school, the state so far has paid no serious attention to this group in the last 20 years. When I was 13-14 years old, I was a pioneer and got some basic skills in this organization. I'm not talking about some united organization, but leadership, self-presentation, team-building skills should be provided exactly at this stage - 14-18 years, the age which is sensitive for this. It is sometimes difficult to teach 20-year-olds the leadership skills that they should have learned when they were 15. We will of course use the experience of the different organizations, both Russian and international. I want to say that, apart from the organizations that I went through in my time, there are other organizations with a unique experience of working with young leaders. For instance, the Association of Young Leaders. We will actively use the experience of this organization and of the Russian Youth Union.
Most projects of the last years were devoted to student youth aged between 18 and 23. Today a new stage for the entire youth policy is starting, connected to the new opportunities given to us by the leadership of the country when the Federal Agency for Youth Policy is subordinated to the Ministry of Education. More than 1000 Russian universities are open to us and we are ready to implement our programs.
Young people after university and working youth, young specialists... We would like to formulate the program to work with these young people in some regions. Some regions have successful practices of working in these directions. In the next months we will systematize this experience and from the following year we plan to start a program aimed at solving the problems of these young people and discovering their potential, because these people - young specialists - are in charge of developing our country's economy and making it one of the leaders in the 21st century. I will stress it again, in order to keep the existing growth of the economy - 4% to 5% a year - their labor production and the innovative potential of the personnel should increase. Therefore, we will separately support technological innovations through councils of young specialists. There are just a few of them now, but we will support their creation.
In this respect we will count on cooperation with the different branches of the economy and corresponding ministries and big corporations. With some of them, we have already established cooperation and we plan to develop it and work together.
Today we are organizing a new program in the North Caucasus aimed at finding and selecting young gifted people and supporting their projects. We participated in seven regional North Caucasian forums from April to June. We selected 2500 project ideas, no other federal district can present such a scale of work. Basically, in every university there are people who, apart from studying, are involved in this systematic work.
On July 1 the forum Mashuk 2012 is due to open, and we are paying special attention to it. It is organized by the administration of Stavropol Territory, but we will attend it to choose the best projects that will be supported within the framework of this competition according to governmental decree № 554.
This year, apart from the aforementioned forums, several specialized conferences took place in the North Caucasus. On June 16 I took part in the opening ceremony of the Youth Culture Festival in Pyatigorsk. I am glad that Pyatigorsk is becoming a youth center for the North Caucasus. On June 16 there were more than 300 gifted young people with different specializations – music, art, cinema, design, fashion. The experts that came there from the best centers of our country, from Moscow and St. Petersburg, were pleasantly surprised and selected some gifted young people who will also be supported. I am glad that this systematic work is going on and I hope that these opportunities will soon be given to the entire country.
Today the federal budget of “Russian Youth” has grants worth 100 million rubles to support the projects of young people in the North Caucasus. This government decree was issued last year. This is one story. In addition, our organization and I personally work together with the other organizations that also give grants and support these forums. These include various foundations and banks. We hope that apart from the 900 grants that we will give, several hundred other projects will be supported by other organizations. The money will not come from our budget, but we are working on it.
We know examples where regions have similar local grant projects, and we hope their scale will increase. However, I would like to note that this work is not enough and I hope that already this or next year we will have a chance to organize similar projects all across the country and not only in such difficult regions as the North Caucasus. We hope to do it with grant support from the federal budget. We are now negotiating this with the country's leadership.
