10 civil society organisations from across the country have received grants worth a total of BGN 100,000 in the ninth fully renewed edition of the Vivacom Regional Grant. Each of the finalists will be supported with BGN 10 000 to implement their idea in the field of education or environmental protection.
“This year we received a record number of applications – 395 from 361 CSOs across the country. This shows that the programme is even more responsive to the needs of the NGO sector in the country,”
said Nikolay Andreev, CEO of Vivacom.
Since the launch of the Vivacom Regional Grant, the telecom has supported 118 projects of 105 NGOs, and the total amount has already exceeded BGN 600,000.
“We, as the Bulgarian Center for Not-for-Profit Law, have been partners of Vivacom since the inception of Granta – a partnership that has grown over 9 editions into an innovative program to support civic activism at the local level. The finalists have already gone through the first lab of the newly introduced accelerator program, where they transformed their ideas into real demonstration projects – an example of environmentally friendly behavior and modern educational approaches”,
said Nadia Shabani, Director of the Bulgarian Center for Not-for-Profit Law.
“The Vivacom Regional Grant is an extremely important initiative that encourages people to actively participate in environmental protection and to make efforts in improving the quality of education. We at United Group have seen the increased interest in the programme and have seen its potential for development. That is why we have successfully implemented it in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it has been running for the third consecutive year,”
said Jovana Lukić, CSR Director at United Group.
After the first accelerator lab, the supported organizations will go through 2 more lab meetings where they will further develop their communication skills and exchange experiences and successful practices with finalists from previous editions of the Regional Grant. The remaining ideas that have been successfully pre-selected will participate in two online trainings on project writing, management and reporting, as well as communications and media outreach.
In the period from April to mid-November, the finalists’ projects will contribute to the protection and conservation of marine flora and fauna on wild Black Sea beaches, to the restoration of natural food chains in the mountains, to overcoming functional illiteracy in young people, to developing foreign language knowledge among the blind, to building the imaginative thinking of deaf children through literary works in the respective regions of the country.
