JULY – The One Where We Built Together

THE ONE WHERE WE BUILT TOGETHER Building together has been an ongoing project during the year of Plovdiv 2019. It started in April and continued throughout the summer. The main purpose of the building together project was to work together with craftsmen from Stolipinovo and create a series of open workshops, where various structures/urban furniture, children’s facilities and small facilities were to be built. The workshops turned out to be almost every weekend. Some of them were for the sub-project Children city, whereas others took place in Stolipinovo. The volunteers were asked to help and

entertain the children that were involved in the project. Also, they needed photographers and videographers to capture important moments during the project. The volunteers were also encouraged to participate in any workshop they would be interested in, such as wood carving, painting and working with different kinds of metals. Any creative volunteers that wanted to learn a new skill, were welcome to join this project.

WEEKLY MEETINGS IN JULY 04.07 Hills of Rock feedback & 100% Plovdiv 11.07 How to Write European projects / Bulgarian Youth Forum 18.07 EU Japan Fest 25.07 As She Sings and Hillock Carnival

JULY EVENTS Some other interesting events that happened in July were the street art and food festival at the beginning of July, the Creative workshop for vloggers that could be attended by our volunteers, and the Summer cinema project. Overall our volunteers were very busy with promoting our events, distributing the programme and attending the projects as photographers. To celebrate all this active volunteering, we started a new initiative: the Volunteer of the Month contest. From the statistics for volunteer participation over the past month, we distinguished the person who was most active and deserving from our volunteers. The winner received a symbolic crown, was interviewed for our volunteer blog, and received a poster on the Wall of Fame that we created in our office. The selected volunteer for July was active in over 21 events during the month and received very good feedback from the project promoters he helped. Volunteers responded quite well to this idea and several of them aspired to participate in the competition.

We also started an internship programme for local volunteers, which provided the opportunity for more

volunteers to intern at the Plovdiv office in 2019. For the summer months – June, July and August, three local volunteers who are also mentors of the teams – Nicol Delcheva, Teodor Danchev and Gabriela Stankova became our trainees and assisted in the preparation of the weekly meetings.

In addition to our weekly meetings, we also organized Social Meetings for the volunteers, where they had the opportunity to create new acquaintances with each other and exercise teamwork. We started with a movie night, and in July we invited the Rise of Dice organization to do a board game session. During these meetings, volunteers learned about upcoming events that were open to them. We asked them for their opinion on these meetings and received feedback from them that they would like us to organize more active meetings with more workshops and activities.

JULY VOLUNTEER BLOG AS SHE SINGS Written by Peter Solakov

I joined the crew of Plovdiv 2019 and from the first moment, I assumed that this place would be filled with positive energy and that I would meet many amazing people. It took me less than a week to do my first volunteering activity and it proved me right.

The first thing I had to do was help with the translation for the musical journey and event ‘As She Sings’, which told the story of 4 amazing women with inspiring stories and awesome voices. The stories they told were stories about the place of women in our society and about the songs in different cultures. It was so interesting to listen about the way that Yiddish mothers, daughters and granddaughters sit together cooking and singing and how this language has been influenced by all of Europe and has a little of everything, not only in terms of grammar or words, but also in the style of living and singing. The personal story of Lucette was just amazing to me. She had grown up with a dad who hid his Yiddish lineage and she couldn’t learn about her culture from her biological family but in her twenties , after an eventful trip to Israel and a meeting with an interesting man, she found a new family among the circles of Yiddish women whose songs helped her understand herself better. The stories of Ginka Tser were just as interesting – a woman, who has worked and sung with the people of the Roma culture for more than 40 years and who is now passing her legacy on to her talented granddaughter, one of the top 10 under the age of 16 singers in Bulgaria. Ginka told us about the origin

of the Roma people, who are an ethnicity which came from India after they were given as slaves to the Persian king by the Indian ruler, they proved good at singing, dancing and performing but not so good at working the ground or taking care of animals, so they were set on their own path to travel the world without an end goal. Ginka sang some of their songs which are filled with emotion and often tell personal stories not so different from what most young people go through – stories of stubbornness, love, hardship and happiness. The third person of this amazing trio is Maria Pasheva, whose story of growth and learning began from a young age when she played music and sang well enough to be encouraged by her parents to follow her passion and study music in the national musical academy. At first, she didn’t really like this kind of music but when she went to her new school she met different people from different places and every single one of her classmates had unique experiences with all of the different kinds of Bulgarian national music, she discovered the beauty and diversity in this kind of art.