Dolna Banya, July, 11-13, 2022
Talks, questions, sharing about the huge gap between how young people define health care problems and how adults see them; about the lack of trust in the institutions regarding their reaction in cases of violence, even for registered ones! We discussed that deep in our national psychologyit is stated that talking about mental health and "shameful" illnesses is not good, when it happens at all it is hidden, superficial and stigmatizing, and thus leads to dramatic complications for people in personal plan. We also talked about the nuances of "advocacy" and "lobbying."
We from the BFPA team think that we are really lucky for working with a group of wonderful young people - from the youth clubs in Pernik and Breznik and from the American University in Blagoevgrad (AUBG). The workshop was held July 11-13, 2022, in Dolna Banya. Our work topics are advocacy and campaigning.
We presented theory and already implemented good practices and made efforts and first steps to realize youth ideas for campaigning to support local communities for health prevention and health services. We presented interesting methods such as Photo voice, and young people have with complete freedom of choice and creativity, and we continue to support and mentor them.
Work in the field of mental health, need of services in the field of dental medicine for children and need to change the living conditions and of marginalized communities are among the identified problems, for the solution of which the young people from Pernik, Breznik, Pernik and AUBG (for Blagoevgrad) are the directions chosen for campaigns development. During the three-day training, they developed detailed plans for the implementation of local campaigns, including time frames and estimated budgets.
We continue to support their efforts and our mutual work continues in the frame of the project #YouthVoicesYouthChoices, supported by the socially responsible business initiative #MSDforMothers
