Education Bulgaria Project #5271

Summer School for Children without Parents

by Step for Bulgaria Foundation

Project Report | Jan 24, 2011
January 2011 update

By Elena Furnadjieva | Project leader

Dear Friends,

As we’re still far from the summer, there is not that much yet to report on our plans for the upcoming Summer Academy for Bulgarian teenagers living in social care institutions. What we can report on is how our full-year educational program is going – a program through which we train underprivileged youth in life skills and prepare them for adult, independent life. Thanks to the participation in that program, some of our students will be selected – based on their attendance and responsible participation in activities throughout the year – to participate in the upcoming summer academy.

So far, we’ve completed the first module of our full-year educational program. That involves training the psychological awareness, introspective capacity and emotional intelligence of our students. Most of them rarely get listened to and taught what it means to be responsible, understanding, empathic, communicative and appreciated by others. We’ve been working to build their self-confidence and assertiveness as well as their ability to interact with others in a mature, constructive way. The next module in this program is dedicated to learning what human rights are, what they mean, what they imply for each of us as well as how to defend one’s rights and dignity.

While working on the full-year life skills program, we have also been thinking about the structure and content of this year’s Summer Academy. We’ll soon be in touch with more details about that. We are planning to have a much more real-life oriented “curriculum” – one of the ideas is to bring the group of students (the most dedicated participants in our full-year program) to a real business (be it a hotel, a restaurant, a farm, or another service-based business) and have them participate in various activities their for a week. Before that, they would have some training in basic tasks needed to be able to perform job responsibilities at that business. The goal is to demonstrate to the kids what it takes to be an independent professional, what tasks entail everyday work, as well as what qualities and attitudes one must have to be successful in that. We hope to help our students to realize how key responsibility, accountability and trust are in regular professional relationships – today we see our students often lack these qualities as no one ever expected of them to demonstrate such behavior. We will continue providing English and leadership training to supply our students with additional professional skills.

Thank you all for your generous support! Please don’t hesitate to write back with any ideas, suggestions and questions – this can hugely help our work!

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Oct 19, 2010
Summer Academy 2010 final report

By Elena Furnadjieva | Administrative director

The Summer Academy 2010 is now completed. Thanks to your amazing help we were able to raise enough funds to pay for the accommodation and food expenses of 8 (out of 41) teenagers living without parental care who participated in the education camp this year. They spent two weeks with their peers from from 5 different Bulgarian cities (and 6 different social care institutions) learning useful skills and knowledge to prepare for their successful entry into society and the labor force. During the camp's two weeks (between end of August and early September), the 41 participants were taught by more than 20 volunteers (professionals and students from various fields) coming from 6 different countries classes in English language, computer skills, personal finance, and entrepreneurial skills.

This year the participants were split into five student business groups, who had to create a project proposal in order to obtain the necessary budget to implement their idea. Projects ranged from hotel marketing to an environmental awareness building initiative. Through working on these business projects, the students realized how challenging, yet how rewarding is to work in a team to conceive, defend and bring to reality a specific idea. This experience gave them a good taste of some essential professional skills and motivated them to learn more about each other and about the specific business topics they engaged with.

The Summer Academy hosted several guest visits by professionals from various fields - ranging from a catering company manager to the U.S. Ambassador in Bulgaria. These visits allowed the participants to learn what it takes to be successful in a specific profession and to expand their horizon of opportunities for their future career development. Our volunteers worked with the kids not only in teaching them new knowledge but also in developing their talents and curiosity to learn new things. Various workshops were held during the academy, including Chinese calligraphy, theatre, dance and robotics.

At the end of the Academy, the feedback received from the young students and their supervisors demonstrated that we have succeeded in engaging them in mastering new knowledge in English, finance and entrepreneurship as well as in motivating them to want to learn and develop. The student supervisors, who know them well as they work with them everyday within the social care institution, noted the positive change in behaviors and attitudes of the students during the course of the two weeks. Our volunteer recognize the experience as very challenging, yet formative and rewarding.

Based on the learnings from this summer, our team is committed to work hard on developing the right set up for next year's summer academy. We'll keep you posted on what shape this takes. Our current thinking is to beef up the vocational training options offered as part of the summer academy (which are currently only touched upon through the guest visits of various professionals) and to maintain the focus on motivating and inspiring our students to aim high, to set specific goals, to design a concrete plan to get there and to not give up until they achieve them.

We thank you all for the great support that you have offered - both material and spiritual - given that we're a completely volunteer-run organization, the support we see in donors of the globalgiving network gives us yet another reason to work persistently to create better life opportunities for the underprivileged youth that we work with. Thank you!

Links:

Attachments:

Detailed report of the 2010 Summer Academy (PDF)

1 Attachment

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Jul 7, 2010
Progress report June 2010

By Evgenia Peeva, Petia Veleva | President, PR manager

Progress of the Project 'Teach life skills to children without parents'

Thanks to our supporters the preparation of Summer Academy as a part of the 'Teach life skills to children without parents' project is on its way! Between August 22nd and September 4th, 40 children without parents will take part in the educational sessions near Varna, Bulgaria. We have already selected all young participants as well as 16 volunteers (6 international and 10 Bulgarians) who will be teaching English and computer literacy, mentoring the student entrepreneurship groups and conducting creativity and sports workshops during the two weeks. In addition, we have various external coaches and professionals who'll be visiting the Academy, including: yoga professionals from the Bulgarian Yoga Association, personal development coaches from University of the 21st century and Art of Living, budgeting and financial skills trainer, survival skills trainers.

The Summer Academy's curriculum is almost finalized by now. It covers three main aspects of personal and professional development:

1. Practical professional skills: the Academy features daily classes in English and computer skills as well as individual career orientation coaching sessions.

2. Entrepreneurship: all the children work in groups of 5 to 8 people, to develop their entrepreneurship projects during the 2 weeks of the Academy. The interactive activities, along with specific trainings by professionals, help the young participants business development, product creation and project management basics, such as teamwork, planning, public speaking, and positive thinking.

3. Personal skills development: various creative and sports workshops allow the children identify new interests, passions and talents.

The 3000 GBP raised by now for the project with the assistance of GlobalGiving will be use to cover expenses for housing, meals and transportation for the children for the two weeks period of the Summer Academy. The total participation expense for one child is ~200 GBP. With the GG funding already collected, we can now cover fully the expenses of 15 out of the 40 children. This is great success and we thank you full-heartedly for your generous support!

We would like to express our gratitude to our supporters and to kindly ask you for any suggestions and opinions about our project. We would deeply appreciate your comments as we believe that together we can find better ways to help Bulgarian children without parents.

Links:

20 participants in the full-year program coming this summer!

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