The traditional annual meeting of the National Network for Children has started and on the first day the advocacy topics of the organizations in the Network for the next year were identified in the areas of Education, Child and Maternal Health, Child Justice and Family Care and Early Childhood Development. The goals were identified through thematic working groups with experts from across the country working with and for children and families. In the working groups, first of all, the experts from the advocacy department of the National Youth Council presented the current state of children’s policies in the different areas – Diana Andreeva for Education, Bella Damyanova for Family and Social Policies, Nadezhda Tsekulova for Child Health and Georgi Elenkov for Justice. Then the representatives of organizations from all over the country together raised the most important issues that require urgent intervention by the responsible institutions. We will soon publish them on our website.
More than 160 experts from 75 organizations of the Network are part of the Annual Meeting 2024 of the NNC, which this year is held in Plovdiv. Traditionally, the opening session is hosted by young people from NNC’s Megaphone programme. Now it was Biljana, Laura and Ioana, part of the new group in the biennial program for children and youth participation of NNC, as well as part of the Organization of Bulgarian Scouts.
Part of the first day was also the panel “The Values that unite the Network”, moderated by Hermina Emiryan. All participants took part in it in order to extract in group work what are the values common to the Network that make the voice of the largest association of 130 civil society organizations and activists in the policies I children and families in the country strong.
There are two more days of the Annual Meeting with trainings on student mediation against school bullying, fundraising in the NGO sector, promoting the work of organizations and working with the media, how to win the war against misinformation and propaganda, and also visits to organizations in Plovdiv.
The 2024 Annual Meeting is being implemented as part of the INSPIRE: Improving National Support for Prevention, Intervention and Response to Violence against Children and Empowering Victims project. Its main objective is prevention and response to violence against children and empowerment of victims. The project is implemented by the Workshop for Civic Initiatives Foundation (WCFI) and the National Network for Children (NNC) and is co-funded by the European Union.
On the last day of the Annual Meeting, opportunities to apply for targeted grant funding under the INSPIRE Fund, part of the project, will be presented. This information meeting is the second in a series of meetings taking place between 7 and 20 June. You can find out more about the meetings here.
