Between the 2^nd and 4^th of June in Bankya, a training, regarding BFW’s Community Development Program, was carried out. The program is now in its third edition in a row and brought together 25 activists and leaders of local communities from 16 small and big settlements, engaged in topics of community organizing and mobilizing.

The facilitators of the training shared their enriching practical skills in terms of organizing and mobilizing communities with the attendees.

Valentina Georgieva is a professor of Cultural Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, author of the book “Multitudes of dissenters. An Anthropology of the Protest Movements in Bulgaria (2009-2013)”. She has been a member of different self-organized collectives from 2013 up until now, as well as the co-founded “Autonomy Factory” and “KEF”- Club for Eclectic Feminism. In 2018, she got into community organizing, because she finds a lot of intersection points between this method, and the hardships, that she’s found in her work. Throughout October-November 2019, she did an internship in New Orleans at the organization “A Community Voice” and ACORN – the biggest organization for community organizing in the US.

Vladislav Petkov is a lawyer and anthropologist by education, expert, trainer and activist. He has passed a practical teaching program for organizing communities in the US, as well as training for teachers of human rights by the Council of Europe. He works on different initiatives for empowering young people, Roma people and the LGBT+ community.

After the end of the training, the second part of the program awaits. In it, all participants will have the opportunity to apply for financing from BFW up to 1700 leva, which would allow them to apply the newly gained knowledge and realize their project ideas.

A participant in our training shared: “Creating and sustaining a community are both incredibly vital elements for the success of any project. I am beyond grateful for everything that I learned, and for your part in reminding me of the importance of the power of empowering”.

Some of the successful initiatives of local leaders, supported by BFW in the previous edition, are organizing a petanque competition, creating a site for socializing and informing senior citizens, “Academy for women entrepreneurs”, a playground, that accommodated kids with specific needs and many more. Learn more about the projects, that we financed last year here.

The project is realized thanks to the financial support of the Global Fund for Community Foundations.