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We spread joy worldwide through music, art, circus and dance. Working with vulnerable, abandoned, outcast and poorly people, we run creative sessions to help build confidence, aid childhood development and strengthen communication.

Mission statement: By providing English-language speech and debate tournaments, student leadership opportunities, and international programming to Bulgarian high school students, the BEST Foundation promotes critical thinking skills and free thought so as to foster a community of engaged, democratically-minded citizens who are committed to creating a bright future for Bulgaria. Vision: We believe that words are powerful, and can engage diverse viewpoints to contribute to the well-being of societies. Programs: BEST accomplishes its mission through the following activities: - providing speech and debate tournaments to Bulgarian and foreign students - supporting teachers and coaches with curriculum and trainings - creating student-centered leadership opportunities - informing and educating students about local and global issues and ideas - fostering a network of citizens who envision and are working toward a bright future for Bulgaria Impact: Though no two experiences through BEST are alike, the following characterizes significant patterns of change experienced through participation in BEST's programming: 1) Exposure: Through BEST, participants are exposed to new ideas, views, and perspectives. 2) Conviction: Participants then begin to care about certain ideas that they have been exposed to. 3) Education: Once they find an idea they care more about, they begin to learn more about this idea, and become more critically aware of what is going on. 4) Action: Based on what participants have learned and care about, they take action. Action can take many different forms.

AIPC Pandora is a non-profit organization that works to generate the knowledge and the capacity of action needed at the international level for the construction of a more just and peaceful world. For this, we develop Global Learning Experiences for educational, intercultural, solidarity or professional insertion in one of the 57 countries in which we are present. We work both in Outbound / Outbound and Inbound / Host projects in Spain, offering transformative experiences based on the "Learning-Service" methodology that form global citizens in how to intervene in the great challenges of the world today.

The TimeHeroes Foundation was founded in 2011 with the goal to build and develop the volunteering culture in Bulgaria. Today the organisation runs the largest volunteering platform in Bulgaria - TimeHeroes.org. By the end of January 2018, TimeHeroes.org has matched 638 organisations which need support for their causes with over 40 000 individuals who wish to donate their time and skills. So far the volunteers have taken part 65 379 times in 1400 volunteering initiatives (called missions) in 175 towns across Bulgaria. The platform is the main, and often sole, source for Bulgarian nonprofit organizations and active citizens to recruit volunteers. To achieve our mission to develop Bulgaria's volunteering culture, we run several further projects. ANNUAL AWARDS We established the annual volunteering awards THE HEROES, which reward outstanding volunteers, organisers, responsible companies and media (after open nominations), and promote and stimulate volunteering as a whole. In 2017 a jury selected 23 of the 226 nominees and these were announced at an official ceremony that was widely covered in media, was attended by 250+ guests and was streamed 26 000 times. YOUTH VOLUNTEERING We are growing a network of school and university volunteer clubs across the country. Over 30 clubs are currently active with 500+ student members organising their own community-based initiatives or supporting existing volunteer missions held by local nonprofits. SENIORS' VOLUNTEER PHONE LINE We operate a National Volunteers' Phone Line volunteering telephone line as an alternative to the website for people without access to the internet or a computer, mainly targeting seniors and retirees. This project aims to tackle the pervasive societal isolation in this age group in Bulgaria. CAPACITY BUILDING Through workshops and systematised good practices we are actively building the capacity of Bulgarian nongovernmental organisations for working with volunteers. In 2015-2016 we collected and systematised the experience of 250 Bulgarian NGOs working with volunteers. We are sharing this know-how in a wiki platform, a 100-page handbook and a series of workshops. Over 1000 NGOs have received the handbook, about 100 have so far participated in our highly-rated workshops. We also fundraise and distribute monthly small grants enabling volunteer involvement in causes.

BCause Foundation is an expert organisation, a recognized leader with more than 20 years experience at national and international level (since 1995). We encourage people, organizations and communities to transform their lives, by developing the giving culture and social investment.

Our mission is to help. Help children who truly need us. We've started this project years ago and put in all of our soul, heart, energy and professionalism. Our last project, however, is different! Different in scale, duration, direction. If we want to successfully keep it on we need the help of many more people and make them stand behind our idea. So we dream and we hope that this pilot initiative will become a mission of the whole society. With joint efforts, new ideas and forms we hope to achieve results which affect society, the economy and the state. After 13 years of working with disadvantaged children we came to the conclusion that about 40% of adolescents among them have intellectual potential well above average, and every second child has a brilliant talent or gift. Thus, the project School of Arts and Crafts for Socially Disadvantaged Children was born . Generally our mission is: To provide an opportunity for talented and gifted children to receive free quality education and upbringing. Help to maintain, develop and improve their natural potential and turn it into a capital for their future; To provide an individual approach and professional care, excellent facilities and environment filled with comfort, peace and love; To promote the growth of good and smart people motivated and confident to realize their professional and life start; To provide the best team of teachers, mentors, experts and inspiring artists who lead children to self-knowledge and self-expression. In fact, our most important mission is to have many, many smiles on the faces of the children! Being happy with everything that happens to them and around them, feeling comfortable in their growth and confident that after graduating from our school they have the knowledge and skills necessary to hold the future in their hands.

If we have to put our mission into generalized terms, they should be interconnectedness and community-building. We create the suitable conditions and occasions through our projects (such as Baba Residence, EMPATHEAST and Social Innovation Challenge) for different people with diverse know-how to meet and start implementing their changemaking skills and look for solutions together in their immediate environment. We seek to engage and connect the most significant cultural and economical agents in order to reach positive social and cultural changes. To connect artists and anthropologists, bussineses and folklore traditions, local authority and people from the villages etc. Since we're devoted to highlighting the local cultural and entrepreneurial potential and resources of different Bulgarian regions/ cities/ villages, our main tendency is to work more and more on-field. In order to be fully able to extract and connect different sectors and cultural actors in a fruitful way, we need to know the problems / challenges from within and with the people who are affected by them and can trigger any possible future change. So to say, one of the main routes of our mission is to nourish slow-movement conscious change within the communities we're part of through both observation and participation. And sometimes this can be achieved through very simple initiatives such as organizing a sedyanka (a traditional Bulgarian work gathering in the villages; working-bee) with young people in the villages or just giving the old ladies a reason and stimulus from a village to start using their looms again and share their knowledge with a young designer.

femLENS' mission is to visually educate and make technologically aware the most vulnerable and resourceless women of our society through documentary photography made accessible by mobile phone cameras and cheaper point and shoot cameras.

to mobilise its members to reintroduce sustainable Sport for All and physical activity practices into everyday lives, using the Designed to Move physical activity platform.

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We are a Bulgarian non-for-profit legal entity, established in 2008 to stimulate the development, improve the quality of life and vitalize the region of Devetaki Plateau. We mobilize local communities and resources to reduce social and economic disparities between the villages in the Devetaki Plateau and the big towns in Bulgaria. The Association's efforts are aimed at development and promotion of the region as a tourist destination.

Board of European Students of Technology is a non-profit and non-political organisation that since 1989 strives to improve communication, cooperation and exchange opportunities for European students. The mission of BEST is to help students achieve an international mindset, reach a better understanding of cultures and societies and develop the capacity to work in culturally diverse environments. To achieve this mission BEST offers high quality services to technology students all over Europe. These services include a European engineering competition, academic courses, career events and events on educational involvement. BEST offers these events in 96 European Universities, spread among 34 countries, reaching over one million students, with the help of 3300 members. It is BEST's mission to provide complementary, non-formal education in every event that it organises. This to make sure that the students that are reached grow to their full potential before they enter the job market. It is essential for BEST to show students the value of complementary education, not only to widen their perspective on the technology topics covered in their studies, but also to teach them the needed soft skills. To begin, these soft skills are covered in BEST's events by bringing students together with its two other stakeholders, universities and companies, and letting them dialog. Secondly, BEST provides specific training sessions to teach students how to acquire these skills in a safe and stimulating environment among peers. Lastly, this is done not only towards outside students, but also towards BEST's own members. By letting them organise events after they had a thorough knowledge transfer and did some in-depth training sessions, they acquire a lot of hands-on experience that makes them valued assets on the job market. In all this soft skill acquirement, there is one thing that makes BEST special: everything happens in a culturally diverse environment. BEST's volunteers really learn how to cooperate with project members from all over Europe and also the outside students are introduced to a specific mindset that BEST likes to call 'the BEST spirit'. This means that everyone works together, respecting each other's backgrounds, to achieve a common goal: empower students and give them a voice in today's society. For this donation campaign BEST would focus on the educational involvement that it stimulates among European students. It is namely very unique that an organisation run by students offers their peers a voice by collecting data in surveys and events and presenting that data to the relevant authorities. BEST, therefore, attends a lot of conferences about education to be able to share our outcomes to the fullest. We hope to raise some donations in this campaign to be able to carry out next year's planning around the theme of Digital Literacy. This theme focuses on how prepared students and universities are for the upcoming digitisation wave. It raises the question of how we will learn and teach digital skills and how industry 4.0 will make its way into our education. For this program BEST invests in conducting surveys, doing symposia on education and writing scientific papers with the purpose of disseminating the outcomes. It is not the first time that BEST is going to conduct such an Educational Involvement Programme. Last year, for example, the theme was 'Diversity in STEM education' and the years before we covered topics such as pedagogical skills, new teaching methods, relation between university and industry, etc. So what were the steps BEST undertook to create all the materials around last year's topic? First, a team was created to do research on existing literature about 'Diversity in (STEM) education'. Based on that research a survey was created in which 4 diversity types were tackled: cultural diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity and students with disabilities. Then, after the answers of the survey were gathered and analysed, the subtopics for the BEST Symposia on Education were identified: in this case, each symposium had a different diversity type. The same team that worked on the content creation of the symposia also prepared and delivered the sessions of those symposia. After the events, the input of all the participating students is gathered in a scientific report, which is then either published in conferences, or disseminated through social media and newsletters. The approach used last year proved to be a successful one and will be repeated in this year's Educational Involvement Programme. If we manage to get more funds via Global Giving, this will mean that we can elaborate this process and spend more resources on content creation, promotion of the surveys and dissemination of our results. In short: we will be able to make a lot more noise in the educational world.