Maya Doneva is one of the heroes of Varna. After a volunteering experience in Poland, she started asking why there are not more interesting youth activities in Bulgaria too. Together with enthusiastic friends she creates the youth organisation IDEA and the group for volunteering ‘Pink glasses’. It is there where the idea for a Social Tearoom emerged. The initiative offers mentoring support and a first job to young adults who grew up without parental care. In the last couple of years Maya has focused on training in the field of civic activity, social innovation and start-up ideas with a marked social effect. She is also a trainer at the European youth forum and a part of the team of Varna for European capital of culture in 2017. Maya was also one of the participants in the first Evening for Dreamers in Varna.
We asked her to imagine a future Bulgaria with more tearooms. This is what she wrote:
It all started with the Tearoom
The year is 2020. The tearoom is a place for events and tea. A nice place with cool events, smiley staff and light food. As you know, it is already full with tearooms all around Bulgaria. It all started from the Varna Tearoom in 2016. It is a place where young adults without parents are working. Apart from getting their first job there, they also receive mentoring that aims to help them take care of themselves, value themselves and successfully reach their goals. The children without parents in Bulgaria are many and when four years ago a young motivated team from Varna decided to open the first Tearoom it was very difficult. It took a month to convince Varna Municipality to provide a building for us, but we made it and got a wonderful cultural monument in the heart of Varna. It took more than a year and a half to fundraise the necessary starting capital, but it happened. And it started working – with baby steps and a bit insecurely at the start. A hired staff of only seven people, a lot of volunteers, unplanned reconstructions and a many months of working with no profit made, but without a bit of hesitation about where we are going and where we want to get.
In the first two years of the Varna Tearoom a lot of mistakes were made: tea was never enough…
Or there was too much of it in the storage. There were money missing from one of the tills and we had our electricity cut at least twice because we forgot to pay for it. Once we were fined during an inspection as the guy who makes sandwiches always confused the fridge where we keep cheeses and the one where we keep meat. Our roof was running for months, and a tree grew from it. Seriously. The donated furniture we got from the University of Economics and the Bulgarian Red Cross endured the tiny flood that happened because of the old tubes of the building, but we never fixed that door that still creaks.
Three years after the start there were 14 girls and boys who worked for us, who continued their way after the Tearoom as students, bartenders, waiters, volunteers, mothers and fathers, humans. During the summer of our third year the first herb garden of the Tearoom started working. There we hired more people and we were already breeding our own thyme and mint. For four years our mentoring programme educated more than 250 girls and boys – teaching them how to set goals, what emotional intelligence is, how to value ourselves and others, why they should volunteer, why they should require more from themselves.
During the first three years, we hosted so many events and trainings that we do not remember their number anymore
Evenings for acoustic guitars, afternoons for poetry, trainings about multicultural dialogue, herbology, and workshops on bread making. For four years our mentoring programme succeeded in engaging tens of volunteers, who were taking our young adults to the theatre, cinema, camping, and talking. For four years our mentoring programme proved that it works very well and that we cannot make social change without human approach and that the approach of mere statistics is impersonal, boring and gives no results. For four years our mentoring programme and the Tearoom proved that they work. That is why there are now many tearooms. The second one opened in Plovdiv as early as 2017 – four wonderful ladies headed the project there and overtook the Varna Tearoom by results. In 2018 we opened two more Tearooms in Sofia and Veliko Tarnovo, and in 2019 – in Bourgas. It is funny now how hard it was at the start because nobody remembers anymore – the sleepless nights, the lack of money, the reconstructions, the need to motivate those not motivated, the effort to believe in someone in whom no one believes, the lack of confidence, the difficulties… But they are sweet now, because if until five years ago no one knew about the Tearoom, today we are already a chain, a network, a team, a group of people.
Back to 2016.
It is very hard for me not to give up every morning when I enter the Tearoom and I smell not tea, but mold. Moisture is both felt and seen. Still. However, we are starting the long-awaited reconstruction. Tiles, parquet, walls, windows, a bar, a kitchen… We are starting, because we cannot give up – none of us can give up. We have been volunteers for a long time and we know the story of everyone we work with. We know where their parents are, if they have any at all, what their grades are, who their first kiss was and which their favourite movie is. We know what their weaknesses are and we try to show them what they’re capable of in order to achieve it. Each of them is an individual. We know each donator not because they are a few, but because they are important and we want to remember them, to inform them how far we have got and to drink our tea with them.
The trust we got from children, young adults, donators, volunteers and the trust that we gave to ourselves do not allow us to give up despite the smell of mold. Behind every voluntary activity there is mentoring support and hours of trainings. Behind every mentoring programme there are concepts about social innovation, youth involvement, personal development and hours of research, conferences, and talks.
Behind every boy and girl from an institution for children without parental care there is a story – in most cases a sad one.
I know that we can make it. I also know that it takes time. But the Tearoom has us, and we have all the necessary hope and support. We want to create the Bulgaria from 2020, because we know that the one from 2016 has the potential to be a much better one.
