PROMYANATA is about friendship.
The Give a Book Foundation operates as a mediator between children living in institutions and volunteers who are ready to donate some of their time to become their mentors and friends. Thus, kids find that important adult who supports them and guides them, helping them feel important and follow their dreams.
For the past 10 years, they have set up a network of over 500 actively engaged volunteers who support over 400 children living in 18 institutions around Bulgaria. They organise monthly visits of their volunteers to the institutions where they help the kids with the lessons and give them exciting, new experiences.
Why support them:
Children who live in institutions are in isolation in general. The COVID-19 pandemics completely deprived them of any chance to get in contact with the outside world. They can’t go out, and can’t meet their mentors. This harms their motivation for learning, makes them passive and depressed and even unlocks their aggressive behaviour. To continue to support the children and maintain their friendship with their volunteers, Give a Book decided to take their work online.
To this end, they created The Scholarship – a programme that will give every child the chance, based on their own abilities, to set a goal out of a given list of ideas: for example, to learn the multiplication and division tables or reach A1 level in English. Then, with the online support of their mentor, to work on achieving this goal. Every child who meets their goal in time would get a prize a scholarship of BGN 100. If they want, they can then pick another goal and apply for the scholarship again.
To secure the smooth functioning of online training, Give a Book will help the institutions by securing equipment and teaching the kids and employees there to use this equipment. They will also organise personal visits with a limited number of volunteers and social workers. Thus, they will be able to discover the children who are worst affected by the isolation, give them psychological support and involve them in the Scholarship programme.
Through the Scholarship, Give a Book will show the kids living in institutions that they are not alone, even in this hard period of isolation. They will help them learn how to set goals and meet these goals. They will help them realise that when you persevere and fight for your goal, your efforts always pay off. They will prepare them for their lives as independent grown-ups.