Teach life skills to children without parents

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