Ideas Factory Association

Sofia, Sofia, 1680 Bulgaria

Mission Statement

Ideas Factory Association is a non-governmental non-profit organization which was founded by an informal group of young people in the end of 2006. It was an answer to the “Let’s save Irakli” campaign which brought to light the necessity of connecting causes and professionals from the creative industries in order to reach more innovative solutions. As a result the Ideas Factory created the format called “Creativity for Social Change” and started a constantly growing network of people whose innovative ideas and projects to be developed with the help and know-how of the IF. That is how the Changemakers Academy was founded, where the IF builds and develops the capacity of people determined to change their environment. The organization has an office and full-time staff and an internship program since 2011. Our passion is the connection between social change and playing (through art, culture, informal education methods) as means for creating an environment favorable for the development of social entrepreneurship.

About This Cause

Baba Residence project of Ideas Factory is our main local cause. Baba Residence (baba - grandmother in Bulgarian) is an initiative bringing together urban youth and elderly people in depopulating villages in Bulgaria. It creates the soil for a truthful exchange of knowledge and care between youth and elderly through design thinking and ethnological approaches. The result is new quality of human relations between generations and social entrepreneurial projects that help the villages flourish again. Bulgarian villages are rapidly depopulating and are losing their economical sustainability, cultural heritage and vitality. Every year at least 1 of them disappears from the map of Bulgaria. Around 570 villages have less then 10 or no inhabitants (NSI). People who live in most of them are pensioners with a pension less than 100 $. Baba Residence has been to 7 villages in the last 2 years and urgently needs your support to give its impulse to the Bulgarian countryside. The young people selected to participate in Baba Residence live for a month in elderly households, renovate shared spaces, learn traditional crafts, collect stories. They get familiar with human-centered design and receive training from professional ethnologists in collecting folklore. Participants use all these new skills to come up with social-entrepreneurial ideas together with the community, which revive the villages and bring back human, financial and other resources. An important result from interaction between urban youth and elderly from the villages - new quality of human relations between generations, between urban and rural communities. The social-entrepreneurial ideas which are being developed after Baba Residence draw businesses, conscious touristic and media attention to those villages.

Ideas Factory Association
5A Poduevo Str., Fl. 3, Apt. 6
Sofia, Sofia 1680
Bulgaria
Phone +359 876 203 125
Unique Identifier 5773731173002_32ce