Dear friends and colleagues, Smaller organizations often struggle to tell their story. There is always something more important to do, like actually engaging with the people we work with. And they have been many in what was quite an intense year. Here is a short story of our encounters in 2018 and of some of our plans for 2019.

Civic еducation in аction

We kick-started the year with an expert meeting with representatives from the Ministry of Education, university professors, civil society activists and teachers, trying to wrap our heads around how best to test the civic education school curricula that are about to be introduced in 2020 across the whole of Bulgaria in the 11^th and 12^th grades of high-school. We paired experts with teachers and built modules that correspond to the curricula and launched the big journey across the country. Between March and December 2018 each of the 9 expert teams had to travel 4 times to the respective teacher and his class and using non-formal methods, tackled civic education topics with classes of the size of 20-25 students. We expect the final evaluation from the students in 2019 and really look forward to seeing what our visits meant for them.

Trainings on methods of teaching civics for high school teachers

Further, we met with over 100 teachers at 6 trainings across the country on how to teach civics using non-formal methods. As a number of teachers put it: “This has been the best training I have ever been to and I really don’t want to go home.” We are now an officially certified teacher training organization.

Citizens’ voice: what does democracy mean to us?

We organized few more town-hall meetings  across Bulgaria, using different methods to discuss what democracy means to us today.

The role of civil society – the fate of Bulgarian Jews during the Holocaust

In a series of lectures between March and May in 8 schools around Bulgaria, we discussed with students the importance of the active role of civil society while elaborating on the complex historical context and events of the Holocaust and World War II in Bulgaria and the region. We developed a methodology using elements of existing approaches of organizations like Facing History and Ourselves and Yad Vashem. Associate Prof. Albena Taneva helped us get the structure right and train a group of her students to visit some of the schools with us. We wrapped the campaign by co-organizing an award ceremony with the Ministry of Education with students nominated for their research projects on “Places and memory”, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the rescue of Bulgarian Jews. their work was rich, creative and compassionate with video materials, oral history, and work with archives. The students gathered around the conclusion that remembering means constant efforts in memory work and that history lessons should never be taken for granted.

Summer School

In June we organized the first ever summer school on memory and democracy in Belene, the achingly beautiful town on the Danube river where the largest communist concentration camp was located on the island of Persin. Some 24 youngsters aged 18 to 24 joined us for an intense week of lectures, conversations, reflections, site and archival work, wrapped up by developing own memory projects.

Teaching our neighbours‘ communist history

Between October and November we carried out 5 open lessons across Bulgaria on the communist history of Central and Eastern Europe. From our work we know that not only do young people not know the own national history of communism, they also know little to nothing about the history of their neighbors. In this 2-year long project supported by Erasmus plus our partners from Bosnia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia and we develop innovative set of new communism-focused history teaching materials across borders. In September we organized 2 workshops in Berlin and Essen – both dedicated to research we have been doing in the past year.  In Berlin we talked about ‘The Generation of Transition’ in Central and Eastern Europe defined as those born between 1975 and 1995 and have come of age in the turbulent years of transition. Following this in November in Sofia we organized a larger conference with our partners from the German Russian Exchange, launching the research paper and looking into the challenges of transition that we still face today. Our upcoming publication in February 2019 describes these and ways of addressing them with civic education. Our meeting in Essen at the Mercator foundation followed the extensive research in Austria, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic with partner Verena Ringler. It looked at the so called civic localism or civic education work on the local level that aims at active engagement. We are looking at ways of ‘re-populating’ the civic deserts of Europe with civic infrastructure. Nutshell We were privileged to be able to share our experience, working examples and know-how in various venues and formats across Europe and the world. We travelled to Alpbach, Beirut, Berlin, Bonn, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Casablanca, Chisinau, Cologne, Košice, Marrakech, Marseille, Potsdam, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw and West Beqaa. In a nutshell, we have travelled approximately 19 050 km in Bulgaria in 8 months this year to work with 500 students, 120 teachers and some 320 citizens at our public discussions in 21 towns and cities in Bulgaria. However, not everything has been great this year. In spring we lost our accountant. Nelly has been greatly missed by her family, friends and clients. Sometimes we still catch ourselves referring to her in our conversations. And we, who are we? A core team of project managers and a large pool of Bulgarian and international experts, who work with us on a project base. What’s next? In 2019 we will….

• Test the civic education curricula at another 6 schools
• Train at least another 100 teachers on methods of teaching civic education
• Our summer school on memory and democracy is aimed at becoming a tradition
• 13 exciting discussions in Bulgarian cities and towns, culminating with an event in Sofia on November 10^th, all marking the 30^th anniversary of the fall of communism in Bulgaria. The citizens’ discussions are aimed as venues for stories and ideas about how Bulgarians identify themselves 30 years post 1989.

We look forward to staying in touch with you in 2019!