SDRUZHENIE PROFESIONALEN FORUM ZA OBRAZOVANIETO

Association “Professional Forum for Education” is a non-profit organization which has a wide range of activities related to the youth work, education and culture. Partners of ours are many schools and NGOs in Bulgaria, including schools where the majority of the students are from the Roma community. The main aims of the organization are to work actively in the field of innovations in education, both with young people and with pedagogues. We focus on involving them in non-formal educational processes, on promoting intercultural dialogue, youth mobility, volunteering, entrepreneurship, active citizenship, tolerance and understanding of diversity. These goals are realized by a number of specific activities provided by our organization, such as seminars, courses, conferences, workshops at schools, spring, summer and winter trainings, as well as activities on local and national level on topics like European citizenship, employment and entrepreneurship, volunteering, Human Rights, innovative educational methodologies, etc. These activities are designed both for pedagogues who would like to integrate non-formal educational methods in the classroom, and for young people among whom we promote these topics, we raise awareness and build their capacity. We were the pioneers organizing an annual Festival of Bulgarian Education – an event where every young person could find out information about Bulgarian and European education and employment opportunities in an interactive and interesting way, and participate in discussions, seminars and round tables on themes chosen by young people. Different sports, art, musical, fashion workshops, theatre, dance performances and other events organized by young people helped them to achieve many competences according to non-formal educational methods. Now we actively support the organization of similar festivals, as the event we were organizing served as a model for other organizations working on similar topics. We already have significant experience in working in the frame of programs like “Youth in Action” and “Erasmus+”. Our members regularly participate in training courses and international seminars in order to develop their competences as youth workers and youth leaders, learn new tools and methods, relevant to non-formal education, and be able to facilitate international youth projects. We also regularly send participants selected through open calls to different youth exchanges and trainings in which we are partners. Around 60 young people from Bulgaria are sent by us to different mobility activities on the international level annually. We have successfully organized several youth exchanges in Bulgaria, in the frame of Erasmus+, on the topic of youth unemployment, entrepreneurship, active citizenship, consumerism, contemporary art and others. Since 2016, SPFO is certified by the Ministry of Education as one of the approximately 80 organizations on the national level in Bulgaria which can deliver trainings for teachers, with 31 educational modules approved, including innovative school models, emotional intelligence, project development, non-formal education, coaching, etc., and it has an official certification for quality control (ISO). During the regular trainings of the organization, more than 300 teachers from Bulgaria are trained annually. We have a strong cooperation with the Sofia Municipality which supports the organization of several of our activities, e.g. city quest games for young people in Sofia, seminars for the promotion of youth activities and for giving more visibility to NGO work, creation of open public spaces for non-formal activities in the city. Two social enterprises were created with the support of SPFO: the Creative House Petrohan which is a center for the organization of seminars and trainings, employing people from minority groups and rural areas and “Uchebnikarnitsa” which is a company buying and re-selling second-hand school books, making them more accessible for users, b