Twinning: The Town of Gravelines
Located halfway between Dunkirk and Calais, Gravelines belongs to the so-called Dunkirk urban area "Dunkirk Grand Littoral" with its 5599 acres and 12481 inhabitants (300 hectares of green parks, 90.5kms of rivers). The town is twinned with Dartford, Biblis (Germany) and Faskrùdsfjördur (Iceland)
Four parts constitute the town: Gravelines town centre, Les Huttes, Pierre's Bridge and little Fort Philippe
Cultural, sporting and entertainment facilities cover a large field (Academy of Great Arts, cinema, music school, library, museum, tourist information office, heritage house, and show rooms).
The main activity of Gravelines town hall is to meet the needs of the citizens, to coordinate the various services which help organise city life.
Therefore, it exists 18 town services such as the youth department and sporting department.
The main aim of the Youth department is to offer youngsters a special place within the scheme of the city and to involve them as citizen and the department is open to all young citizens.
The Youth department is concerned with two areas: Firstly to offer a personalised follow up service to youngsters and secondly to offer training to youngsters to get the skills to create personal or collective projects such as Sixte Tournament, the youth citizenship activity day, the project building activity Fair, and the festival "A'tout jeunes".
Then since January 2005, the youth commission has created a place for every youngster to become a representative and learn about the model of participative democracy.
Sport department develops and creates each year several sporting events and activities. Part of its role is to manage and look after sporting equipment, as well as sailing clubs, and maintenance and security of the beaches. It is in charge of sporting charities equipments and materials.
It is also responsible for the cleaning and security staff of the sporting equipment as well as the teachers.
Reasons and objectives that brought us to take part in Interreg IIIA are that by joining our actions to the overall projects it shows a will to be part of an inter-wards actions programme, and then in a bigger picture as a cross border project at the time of Europe wide Integration.
