ASSOCIATION PROFESSIONAL FORUM FOR EDUCATION – Bulgaria

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.

We have the aim of involving young people in the non-formal educational process, promote intercultural dialogue, youth mobility, volunteering, outdoor and other activities. We aim to foster young people’s will to express their opinion on themes, relevant to the European citizenship, how to solve problems in a non-conflict way and develop a sense of tolerance and understanding of diversity.

These goals are realized by a number of specific activities provided by our organization, such as seminars, courses, conferences, summer and winter trainings and realization of youth activities on local and national level on topics like European citizenship, employment and entrepreneurship, volunteering, Human rights, etc. These activities are designed both for pedagogues who would like to integrate non-formal educational methods in the classroom, and for young people who are motivated to learn more on these subjects and to be an active part of society.

We work with youngsters from different age groups, for whom we organise activities in the frame of "European clubs" at schools that that take place in their free time and have the aim to inform young people about important issues related to Europe, the EU, different countries in Europe and their culture, to encourage them to develop initiatives on European level.

An annual event that we organize is “The Festival of Bulgarian Education” – a place where every young person can 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 performances and other events organized by young people help them to achieve many competences according to non-formal educational methods.

We organize a number of activities in cooperation with other NGOs in Bulgaria and abroad, with local authorities and schools. One example of these activities is our project “Volunteer’s tram” and the “Volunteering Day 2011”, which was focused on promotion on volunteering and charity.

The development of Youth projects as part of the Erasmus Plus has become a priority for us, and nowadays we consider them to be one of the most important aspects of our work as a NGO. 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.