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!
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