Summer School for Children without Parents

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!