Provide Career Counseling for At-Risk Teenagers

Dear supporter,

Our #StepforBulgaria team is excited to share with you the latest news with our ongoing mission to Fast-Track Career Development for At-Risk Youths! 

A lot happened since you last heard fom us. We conducted more workshops, involving both more students and volunteers. We engaged key employers in and around Sofia to help bridge the gap between them and the students. We worked with career counselors to develop an evidence-based approach to work with the students and to prepare our volunteers for conducting that work. We also began making the first steps to share more and more knowledge with the teachers, and are now working on getting the parents involved as well. The work has grown so much so that, in fact, we are currently recruiting among a large pool of applicants for a Career Workshops Consultant to help us be prepared to manage all of it successfully :)

You'll be hearing more in detail about each of the above project-internal initiatives in our subsequent project reports. Before them, we want to tell you about how we have developed the workshops to make them more engaging, focused and effective.

In the gallery below you can see a series of photos illustrating the progression of our workshops from our first one through to our most recent. We've chosen the photos so as to demonstrate how, through time, we have been narrowing down the conversations we're having with the students from classes as big as 70 (1st workshop) to individual or small-group work (2-4 students).

Did narrowed focus mean that we engaged fewer students? No (or we wouldn't be bragging so much about it :)! In fact, in our last workshop, we had timeslots devoted for individual students to come speak with a total of 6 volunteers in HR, Finance, Marketing and Journalism (see photo above). Compared to the ~40 students who previously attended our Motivation workshop at the same school, this format of Orientation workshop attracted 1/4 more, bringing the number of attendees to over 50! Indeed, as we've pointed in our microproject report for that school, we had students interested in Law come speak to an HR professional just because of the "personal" factor (you can find more about our microproject here)

It goes without saying that we will use the evidence of this success to focus all of our future workshops on individual students. Moreover though, we plan to experiment with and find evidence for the success of other factors too, such as the diversity and consistency of volunteers working with the students, the type of interaction they have, short vs. long-term involvement and others. So do be excited to hear from us again!

Finally, none of the above would have been possible with your support. If you like what we do, please consider donating again to our new Give lasting 1:1 career advice to 50 at-risk teens project, which will provide the framework for supporting all 50 and more of the same students in the future.

Thanks once more for allowing us to do what we do.

Best regards,

Dancho and the Step for Bulgaria team 

https://www.globalgiving.org/microprojects/career-workshops-for-at-risk-youths/