Our main objective was to integrate the competencies and experience gained by our staff under project 2019-1-BG01-KA104-061735 into the strategic development of the organization by expanding opportunities to practice lifelong learning, improving our educational offerings for NGOs and strengthening the skills to develop training programs by our organization for the civil sector. Therefore, the project involved Foundation staff who participated in the previous project cited above, as this was the main selection criteria. Through the project 2020-1-BG01-KA104-078593 we further developed the skills of the staff in question and prepared them for the realization of WCIF's ambition to build a modular training programme for adults from the NGO sector in Bulgaria. WCIF has provided such thematic trainings in the past, but has not yet finalized and published its modular training program, which will most likely be offered online. With the project, we have consolidated some key competencies among the WCIF representatives who participated in the 2 mobilities, mainly in terms of digital skills and competencies needed to deliver online training programs. With this project we wanted our employees to: gain knowledge and skills on how to develop and deliver online trainings for NGO representatives; use state-of-the-art methods and tools for training, collaboration and communication in the NGO sector; acquire competencies on how to better support non-profit organizations in their digital transformation; improve their training methods and the educational content of trainings related to digital citizenship development, building an effective digital transformation strategy and outsourcing documentation and work communication to the cloud. The impact of the project is mainly aimed at improving the quality of online education and adult learning in Bulgaria by promoting the growth of European education through the dissemination of best practices and results of educational programs implemented in Austria and the Czech Republic.
We applied for this project because we wanted to build on the skills and knowledge for digital education in the civil society sector acquired in a previous project implemented by the Workshop for Civil Initiatives Foundation (WCIF) under the Erasmus programme. Considering the significant interest in the sector for digital skills training programs, we wanted to develop the competences of the Foundation's team to deliver quality and innovative training programs to NGO representatives, and a number of such trainings were conducted in 2020, 2021 and 2022 /primarily online/ under various programs implemented by WCIF. Our ultimate goal was to increase the impact that civil society can have on different disadvantaged communities and reduce the digital divide. We wanted to strengthen key competences in digital and learning skills, as well as overall communication and lifelong learning, with a cross-sectoral aspect to support collaboration and the development of learning networks in Europe such as the TechSoup Europe network, in which WCIF is an active participant. With the implementation of the project, we wanted to integrate the competences and experience acquired by our staff into the strategic development of our organization by expanding opportunities to practice lifelong learning, improving our educational offerings for NGOs and strengthening skills to develop training modules and tools for the CSO sector. The two mobilities we targeted within the project were predominantly focused on developing advanced digital adult learning skills with the tools and opportunities provided by digital civil society. We wanted our staff to learn the skills needed to easily and quickly guide Bulgarian CSOs to the cloud and cloud technologies and tools. As already mentioned, the project 2020-1-BG01-KA104-078593 is to a large extent a continuation and upgrade of the previously implemented project 2019-1-BG01-KA104-061735, which was of strategic importance for increasing the capacity of the Foundation in providing quality training for the needs of the social sector in Bulgaria.