Enrich the quality of life in Bulgarian villages

Hello, dear Baba-supporters! <3

Thank you for staying on board despite the lack of news from us lately. We've been travelling and trying to organise more short-term initiatives in Bulgarian villages, which are happening more often and are helpful to the local community. We called it Rural Social Innovation Challenge and young people spent 4 days solving local "challenges" together with local people of 7 Bulgarian villages (Dryanovo, Manastir, Chelopek, Dolna Malina, Pozharevo, Novo Selo and Inovo).

Good news is the 25-days long Baba Residence is happening also from 20 August - 15 September 2019 in 3 villages in Vidin region of Bulgaria. It's known as one of the most rapidly depopulating regions with the least number of young people living there.

20 young people from different Bulgarian towns and cities will live in households of elderly in the 3 villages Negovanovtsi, Koshava and Sinagovtsi from 25 days. They will share their dailyhood - work, stories and needs. Of course, the spirit of this year's Residence is quite attached to the sprit of the Danube river and the speicif crafts, agriculture, legends, cooking traditions and everyday difficulties people face. This is what the residents will learn and document. And after their Residency, some of them will start a whole new journey - developing social entreprenurial initiatives for the local community with the local community.

At the end of their stay in the villages, as usual, the young residents will organize a goodbye celebration with the local people.

Stay in touch,

next letter will be sooner than expected.

Thank you!

This all wouldn't be possible if you didn't believe in the simple idea of human connection and supported it!

Yoana and the Ideas Factory team

Dear changemaker,

Happy New year! Let it be heartful and community-inspired!

You haven't heard from us for a while. 

Our organisation has been through some tough changes and challenges - most of them financially related. Most probably, our core team will have to become even smaller, but we'll keep supporting each other in more flexible ways.

It won't be an easy-going year, but we'll make BABA RESIDENCE 2019 happen no matter what!

This autumn we'll make Baba Residence it in the region of Vidin - one of the most problematic and depopulating regions of Bulgaria. We can't reveal the names of the villages yet, but, please, stay in touch.

We're aiming to connect young urban people with elderly in villages that are in even deeper need of communication and economic  support.

We'll need you help this year too to make the initiative alive.

Stay tuned for more information and the renewed version of our crowdfunding page.

THANK YOU!

And enjoy a little bit of the simple pancake joy that granny Steffka and Radka share with us in the video. They're showing the residents in Voynyagovo village how to make "bidi" during Baba Residence 2018 in Karlovo region of Bulgaria.

A recipe in English - in the next update ;)

Links:

• Making of "bidi" - a kind of pancakes - with granny Steffka

Hello, dear Baba supporters

our initiative is getting into its forth year of existence, connecting urban youth and elderly - this time from Karlovo municipality of Bulgaria. The villages are Voinyagovo, Karavelovo and Kliment and 12 residents will live in local households for a month.

The region is rich in diverse crafts and its a priority for the local authority and villagers to support their flourishment. That's why they were open to welcome our residents.

Without your support for the previous edition of Baba Residence, we wouldn\t be able to reach those villages this year, because people already have more trust in what we do, based on the experience from the previous year.

We will keep you informed about the 2018 edition of Baba Residence and how the meeting between youth and elderly creates new value of human relations and story sharing.

Thank you.

your Ideas Factory's team

Hello, heartful supporter of Baba Residence!

Remember you made it possible for 10 young urban people to go live for 1 month and exchange knowledge, dailyhood, share their customs and crafts, renovate shared spaces and sow solidarity with elderly and young ones in Lazhnitsa village in Bulgaria?

This happened in September 2017! 

Now, as promised, the residents work on their very specific cultural and social entrepreneurial ideas to answer needs of the local community they observed and lived with. They include a social enterprise, promoting the local craft of knitting"tsedilki" (a traditional baby sling women use in the village) and a photo exhibition on the topic of religious tolerance.

Thank you for trusting our efforts and stay tuned!

Soon we'll renew the description of our project to fit the needs of Baba Residence 2018!

Let us know if you have any questions, recommendations or ideas!

Yours,

Ideas Factory team

Links:

• http://ideasfactorybg.org/bg/

Dear Baba Residence manifestors,

thanks to your support 9 young urban people have the chance to live in the households of elderly people in an isolated village (Lazhnitsa) in Gotse Delchev region of Bulgaria - to help them, to learn from them and to develop a social-entrepreneurial idea to address problems of the village! Your support made it possible for them to join, and for us to organize, a preliminary training on design thinking, social entrepreneurship and ethnographic fieldwork; to cover the travel costs, the stay of those 9 people and to support the hosting families with a small income during their shared living (3 - 25 September).

Your contributions were infused into those of few more individual donors, who cherish and support Baba Residence – people who donated their birthday gifts (in the form of money) and one who decided to donate a big part of his savings to a nationally recognized cause. 

Just starting the second week of their stay, the participants in Baba Residence 2017 already organized the holiday of one village nearby (Banichan), cooked local specialties, helped for tossing the hay, weaved on a loom, made a crochet, collected folklore stories and many more.

A fan of Baba Residence and in intern at Ideas Factory, M. Krasteva, shares her understanding of why Baba Residence is important for the local community: "Baba Residence is a very important initiative necessary for social change in Bulgaria as it achieves practical results in communication between different generations by keeping Bulgarian traditions alive. Thus, villages in Bulgaria, known until now for a considerable demographic decrease, can begin to flourish and become appealing to citizens and tourists. By being a part of this adventure, residents gain lifelong experience and acknowledge a different daily round, which helps them to think outside the box in searching for social innovation: capacity that they can apply in future achievements."

Links:

• The story of the adventure could be seen here