Vepsian Society: Organization profile
The Vepsian Society (Vepsän Sebr) is a volunteer public non-governmental and non-profit public organization founded for purposes of representation of Finno-Ugric Vepsian minority, living in Northwestern Russia.
Main goals:
- survival and Renaissance® of Vepsians as a nation with its own identity
- preservation and revitalization of Vepsian language and culture
- humanitarian aiding for economical surviving under Russian crisis conditions
Short History:
Vepsian Society was founded 1990 by a group of Vepsian intellectuals as a Union of Middle Vepsian people. Along the time we have realized the necessity to spread out our activity to other local Vepsian communities in St.Petersburg region.
1997 Vepsian Society was registered under its current name (The Society for Preservation of the Vepsian Culture and Language) as representing all Vepsian population in Russia (more than 90% of all Vepsians).
Membership:
All Vepsian indigenous people living on their native places in taiga villages have a priori a status of a free member. They are free of paying membership subscription fees but have right to get gratis materials on Vepsian language and culture etc, published by VS as well as humanitarian aid.
Real work in favour of the indigenous members is curried out by a group of Vepsian enthusiasts and Finnish volunteers supported by a large amount of ordinary members all over the world.
Working fields:
- Introducing Vepsian language as a subject in schools, supporting teachers by salaries, supplying books, teaching materials/devices (computer centers) to schools, financing Vepsian culture programs, holding folklore festivals, international friendship conferences etc. to increase the feeling of national identity of Vepsians.
- Regular humanitarian aiding to needy persons or whole communities in various areas in Vepsia, delivering clothes, food products, remedies for families with children and old singles as well as agricultural equipment etc. for self-production purposes.
- Research activity, documenting Vepsian traditions, archiving folklore and dialect features (e-vocabulary), creating a large digital audio/image/video database archive to cover all the aspects of Vepsian traditional style. Publishing scientific and learning materials.
Financing:
Making hard volunteer work the Vepsian Society had to cooperate with many Russian and Scandinavian organizations to secure financing for our humanitarian and research activity. Startin in the middle of the 1980-s absolutely alone the Vepsian Society could successfully organize in the 1990-s an effective aiding network between Finland and Vepsia.
We are glad to see as our possible future partner any organization or individual, interested to contribute to the preservation of Vepsian culture and language.
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