Child Protection Bulgaria Project #5270

Teach life skills to children without parents

by Step for Bulgaria Foundation

Project Report | Feb 12, 2020
Final Project Report

By Asya Stancheva | Project coordinator

Dear supporters,

First of all, we would like to thank all the 814 donors who have trusted us and thanks to whose generous donations we have realized the many activities of the “Teach life skills for children without parents” project.

Over the past 9 years we have managed to bring over 200 volunteers into our cause and have reached over 700 young people in Bulgaria with one main aim: to empower the youths to successfully pursue their dreams at school, university, work, and in their social life.

To achieve our goals, over the years, we have organized various seminars and training programs, academic courses, summer academies, community events, career workshops and mentoring programs, and many more. Thanks to them, children without parental care have been able to build skills related to psychological awareness and development, effective communication, conflict resolution, human rights protection, body and health care, financial culture and to practice basic professional skills necessary for everyone who plans to work successfully with other people.

All our efforts to work with young people would not have succeeded if it had not been for the tireless and dedicated work of our volunteers. At the end of 2013, our Foundation officially became Center for Work with Volunteers. As part of the project, we have focused efforts to attract, select, train and support volunteers who want to work with underprivileged children and to work with disadvantaged children and youths and help them acquire knowledge and skills for their independent living. We gradually built a cohesive community of volunteers, organized a train-the-trainer program and prepared a trainer's manual.

Deactivation reason

Our foundation has always strived to meet the social needs in Bulgaria and to follow its mission - supporting disadvantaged young people to develop on an equal footing with other peers.

Since in recent years the process of closing down all the old foster homes has ended, and now the children are accommodated in modern centers where they receive regular professional and psychological help, we decided to expand the target group we work with. This determined the closure of this project and directing our forces in broader directions.

At the moment, the target group of Step for Bulgaria Foundation includes every child or youth who grow up without adequate parental support. This includes, but is not limited to, children whose parents work abroad and are raised by relatives, children whose parents are in prison or are very sick or raised by a single working parent. To support these children, we are actively working on our projects Provide long-term mentors to disadvantaged youts and Provide career counseling for at-risk teenagers.

We will be very grateful if you support these our projects and stay connected with the mission of Step for Bulgaria Foundation.

With gratitude,

The Step for Bulgaria Foundation Team

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Jun 27, 2018
Presentation skills 101: Open Door Days

By Yordan Penev | Chief Operating Officer

Preparing for an interview

Dear supporter,

Our #StepforBulgaria team is excited to share with you the latest news with our ongoing mission to Teach life skills to children without parents!

We have 2 great news to report to you:

1. Thanks to your support we were able to dedicate resources, apply, and qualify for grant funding of a social enterprise, through which we will directly provide professional qualification to some of our youths and teach them - through experience - about life skills such as proactive communication, responsibility, initiative, etc. The social enterprise - a kitchen, cafe, shop, and social event space, will also host many new and educational workshops we plan to hold for the youths in the upcoming years. Just last week we rented a place for the enterprise! It's a fixer-upper though, so stay tuned for more updates in the upcomng months :)

2. (And the headline of this report) We successfully partnered with, and are now hosting Life Skills workshops directly with Social Employers (3 of them so far - HP Inc., Cargill, and ServiceSource). For their part, the employers provide us with professional volunteers from across a variety of disciplines and a venue to organize Open-Door events with them (some even pitched into our other programs too!) in which we can teach the youths life skills as applied directly to a workplace environment. For our part, we personally interview and prepare all of the volunteers for working with the youths, we organize the programming and the facilitation of the events, we bring the youngsters (voluntarily!) to attend, and we track and report on the outcomes :) Here is one:

On June 6th we held our first Open Day session of the type, aimed at teaching high schoolers Presentation Skills. The workshop was held at the office of HP Inc., a computer hardware company, which attracted participation from 4 of the youths we had been in touch with. In all honesty, we will have to work on the number a little bit - it was hard to motivate more youths to "apply" for the Workshop by submitting a draft CV, yet, it is what demonstrated their commitment to the event and what made it work. On the flipside, having 4 youths work with the 4 volunteers we had engaged for the event allowed us to provide individual and in-depth attention to each one of them.

In the photos, you'll see one of the youths, Desi, first working on remodeling the CV from her application with one HR recruiter, then conducting a mock interview with another. The workshop included not only these, but also a teaching session on how to present oneself orally and in script, as well as extensive personal feedback from each volunteer Desi and her peers came in contact with. As a proximate indication of success, all 4 of the youths had the marked motivation to apply for our next workshop too! Stay tuned for our next report to see if we'll be able to follow up on their motivation :)

Until then, thanks once more for allowing us to do what we do.

Best regards,

Dancho and the Step for Bulgaria team

P.S. If you continuously like what we do, please consider becoming a recurrent donor! Check out and share our other projects, too, at Mentoring Program for Underprivileged Youth and Fast-Track Career Development for At-Risk Youths!

Mock interviewing

A job well done :)

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Mar 29, 2018
Imagining your dreams and delivering others'

By Yordan Penev | Director of Operations

Paying it forward presents

Dear supporter,

Our #StepforBulgaria team is excited to share with you the latest news with our ongoing mission to Teach life skills to children without parents!

Since December, we continued working individuallyand in group with many of our youths. To be precise, we organized 4 different workshops and events, and we engaged directly with a total of 25 parentless youths, new and old to our program. The events were aimed at, in this order, 1) helping the youths demonstrate their talents and learn more about their applications at a career-concert-charity event; 2) teaching them to visualize their dreams so as to plan their individual routes to achieving them; 3) learning to recognize and be mindful of their achievements, and 4) integrating a pay-it-forward mindset in all they do for higher motivation.

To avoid taking up your day with a lengthy post (and to use our "better" photos!), we've decided to tell you in more detail about 2 of all stories in particular. If you'd like to learn about the others, too, we'd love to share, please, just drop us a line at info@stepforbulgaria.org :)

1) Learning to recognize one's own achievements can lay the groundwork for taking the next step in your personal development. To help our youths make many steps forward, we decided to boost our group's morale by throwing an event aimed at demonstrating the impact of their own achievements to themselves and helping them learn to recognize it. We made the best use of our fortunate timing and combined the event with the celebration of the consequtive birthdays of two of the most experienced youths in our program, Stelian and Andrey. In the photos, you can see us preparing their birthday cakes with Ivan, our accomplished pastry-chef-youth, and Stelian and Andrey about to blow the candles, thinking of their next accomplishment :)

The birthday party pretext allowed us to pool a large crowd of almost all current and some new members of our program. Unbeknownst to them, by coming to celebrate Stelian and Andrey's birthdays, they came to celebrate themselves as well. Over many smiles and laughs and an entire evening, we all huddled together to discuss what each had achieved during the year, and what they planned to do in the next one.

2) One of our internal goals as an organization is to motivate and empower an active community of volunteers to help youths in underprivileged circumstances, with and without our help. For Christmas, we wanted to support the first-time initiative of one of our own active volunteers, Velina, who had the idea to collect and package gifts for youths whose parents were in prison. So, we gathered a group of 5 youths and 5 volunteers, and right before Christmas we headed to Velina's church's basement, where she had been gathering the gifts over the past month. In the photos, you can see us working together to wrap the gifts and, of course, the final product that went out delivered as presents. More importantly than the presents though, in the process of making them, our youths learned about teamwork (we had a production line!) and about the motivation that comes for achieving by learning how to pay forward the products of your achievement.

Finally, a teaser of what's to come: earlier in the year we invested significant time and effort do develop the program's strategy in a way that's more focused and results-oriented than ever before. Do be excited to hear about our next report!

Thank you for allowing us to do what we do.

Best regards,

Dancho and the Step for Bulgaria team

Preparing to celebrate

Celebrating x 2

Paying it forward workshop

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