by Mihaela Voydenova and Donald Xhoxhaj

During the Spring 2021 semester, just like last year, students taking the Social Policy and Politics in the EU course worked in groups on socially-oriented campaigns. In their presentations and campaign descriptions they were to outline the rationale for your campaign; measures / actions that the campaign will involve; its target audience as well as its projected outcomes. On the course’s website, we will present some of their ideas in the form of separate entries.

This Social campaign ‘Support the Unsupported’ aims to assist the people in need of healthcare services and assistance. We are focusing on the ones who live in the rural areas and cannot afford to visit their GP, get the medication they need and receive a proper treatment. There are 409 villages in Bulgaria, which are inhabited by less than ten people. Furthermore, there are 69 villages inhabited by 1 person like the Gabrovo and Veliko Tarnovo rural area. Even though there are social benefits for the senior citizens and the disabled people, a large number of these two target groups are unable to make use of the long term care programs or the social benefit packages that are being offered. Our goal is to provide them with assistance for their vital needs.

What our campaign has to offers is a number of actions, which will result in longer life span and decrease in the stress levels among seniors/disabled people. The five main objectives are:

• Provide healthcare services by building an emergency room which will be fully equipped and there will be a doctor on duty during the workweek.
• Provide an ambulance if it is not possible to arrange an emergency room. The ambulance is a great option too as it will also be equipped and if there is an urgent situation, the person in need of help can be quickly transported to the nearest hospital.
• Provide a mobile pharmacy, which will collect the medication orders from the villages and later deliver the purchases. If a certain village is not accessible by car due to weather conditions we can offer the same service, carried out by drones.
• Assistants that will be available for household tasks or to provide company for one to two hours.
• Raise awareness of the issue that Bulgaria is dealing with, by organizing informational campaigns, charity bazars and distribution of pamphlets in order to popularize the campaign and include the regular citizens into it.

The target audience of the “Support the Unsupported” campaign could be anyone. From high school/ university students to average working people that can volunteer as assistants or donate money for the campaign’s budget. We could also present the campaign to independent clubs like Interact, Rotary or Lions club, which all help to provide humanitarian services or donate to such initiatives.

As for how the campaign will be financed – it will be a co-financed project between the Bulgarian government and the European Union. The plan is to apply for European project, which will help to partially finance the campaign and the rest of the budget will come from the Government. It is important to mention that this initiative is planned as a permanent project, which will be developed through time.

The main project outcome will be the fact that these target groups will have their voice heard and live a happier, healthier life with less stress that can otherwise affect their current health conditions.

Support the Unsupported presentation

by Lara Kapovic, Nadezhda Dimitrova and Zdravko Zdravkov

During the Spring 2021 semester, just like last year, students taking Social Policy and Politics in the EU course worked in groups to  socially-oriented campaigns. In their presentations and campaign descriptions they were to outline the rationale for your campaign; measures / actions that the campaign will involve; its target audience as well as its projected outcomes. On the course’s website, we will present some of their ideas in the form of separate entries.

Campaign justification:

Romania places third to last in the EU scores for municipal waste recycling. A survey by the European Commission found that 7-8% of all Romanian citizens do not find recycling important, which places them fourth to last in the scores of all EU countries. The country also has the lowest land-filling costs in all of the EU, which gives municipalities an incentive for not advancing recycling initiatives. However, if the people organized and demanded infrastructure for recycling, the municipalities would be forced to at least consider recycling initiatives. Also, we can tell people that the inability of Romania to comply with EU norms might result in significant sanctions which will weigh on the economy in an already COVID-ridden world.

The Romanian population has a very clear reason to demand recycling infrastructure from their government. A study determined that 19% of all deaths in Romania are related to environmental issues in the country. This, again, places Romania at the very top of countries with the highest number of environment-related deaths in the EU. The main reasons were determined as the main contributors to this, one of them being Responsible Consumption and Production – number 12 on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, the Romanian population has a very direct incentive to want to recycle. The proactivity of the Romanian citizens’ is so bad in this aspect, that the biggest recycling plant in Romania is importing 50% of its recycled materials.

We have created this campaign in order to inform the population on the consequences of environmental negligence and urge them to push the government and themselves towards a more sustainable future. We will try to achieve this goal through a variety of different means targeting both the population and the municipalities.

Specific Actions:

For one, 64% of the Romanian population uses YouTube. So, we thought it would be a good idea if we were to create a short informative video, which we could also pay to have made into an ad, with playful animations and a concise and clear message, which we could be used to reach the younger generations. Furthermore, we plan to deploy volunteers to hand out flyers and inform people on the risks, consequences and current results of the failure to recycle.

We also thought that we can approach municipalities and negotiate with them to help organize the installation and subsequent collection of recycling bins. For example, we could offer to place recycling bins in the liveliest squares in the cities and then collect them every 1-2 days and deliver them to recycling plants until the municipalities can organize the logistics themselves. We realize that this is a miniscule contribution to the huge problem, but it is significant and symbolic enough to perhaps inspire the population or show the municipality that there is a need for action.

Target Group:

Our main target group is the younger generation, which has grown up in the age of the Internet and is therefore presumably more aware of the environmental consequences of unsustainable development. We hope to capture both middle school students and university students.

Projected Outcome:

It is difficult to predict any quantitative results from the campaign but goals include a minimum exposure of the campaign of 20 000 people, seeing as how the Youtube video and ad will have a tremendous outreach if we manage to convince Youtube to run it as an ad, which isn’t particularly difficult. The flyers will also reach a significant amount of people since they are cheap and easily distributed.