Depopulating Bulgarian Villages can Flourish Again

Challenge

Bulgarian villages are rapidly depopulating and are losing their economical sustainability, cultural heritage and vitality. Every year at least 1 of them disappears from the map of Bulgaria. Around 570 villages have less then 10 or no inhabitants (NSI). People who live in most of them are pensioners with a pension less than 100 $. Baba Residence has been to 7 villages in the last 2 years and urgently needs your support to give its impulse to the Bulgarian countryside.

Solution

The young people selected to participate in Baba Residence live for a month in elderly households, renovate shared spaces, learn traditional crafts, collect stories. They get familiar with human-centered design and receive training from professional ethnologists in collecting folklore. Participants use all these new skills to come up with social-entrepreneurial ideas together with the community, which revive the villages and bring back human, financial and other resources.

Long-Term Impact

An important result from interaction between urban youth and elderly from the villages - new quality of human relations between generations, between urban and rural communities. The social-entrepreneurial ideas which are being developed after Baba Residence draw businesses, conscious touristic and media attention to those villages. 3 social enterprises have been a direct result from BR so far - CD with folklore songs of grannies, rugs with a new design and a game with traditional embroidery.

Additional Documentation

This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).

Resources