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Description
The project supports blind people, refugees from Ukraine. The aim of the project is to encourage visually impaired refugees from Ukraine to tell their personal stories due to the war. Storytelling will increase their confidence in finding possible solutions to the problems, strengthening the relationship between the media and representatives of vulnerable groups, as well as increasing the optimism, commitment and personal responsibility towards the current public problems from the side of bulgarian citizens. The project introduces an innovative approach for creating a micro-community around shared values and increased knowledge and skills for sharing and telling stories and placing them in a wider context which is solution-oriented and fact-based. The project employs refugees from Ukraine with visual impairments who will share their personal stories, as well as powerful stories collected from other war refugees and thus will help the general public to see the difference in the point of view and the way the subject of war is perceived. The project will make a contribution for improving the media informational context and attitudes in the audience to the key news topics related to refugees and how Bulgaria reacts to the challenges of the war in Ukraine.
Summary of project results
The project aimed to encourage representatives of vulnerable groups, including refugees from Ukraine with visual impairments, to share their personal stories, to be heard and to help other refugees in the process of collecting and sharing "first-hand" war stories.
The project had a positive impact on the target groups and stakeholders:
- Through the Media: all publications are visible to the public, the blind, as representatives of people with disabilities and refugees. The materials are uploaded on BLINFO. Thus, all materials are accessible for self-reading and information.
- Ukrainian citizens, refugees from the war, were part of the project and wrote the main articles about the war from a first-person perspective. There are also articles published in Ukrainian, although Ukrainians living in Bulgaria already speak and read Bulgarian. Three Ukrainian citizens, two of whom are blind, were employed and worked on the project.
- The blind community was actively involved in the project through 7 representatives. All publications and materials uploaded on the BLINFO website are also available for reading by the passive users of the website /the reading blind community/.
Through the project, Synergia Foundation became more visible to the public, more recognizable among the blind community and the Ukrainian community in Bulgaria, as well as more trusted by the target groups.
The project was implemented through the empowerment of visually impaired people and refugees from Ukraine. The team that worked for the information-media portal BLINFO /media written by blind persons/ consisted of 3 Ukrainian refugees /two of them completely blind/ and a team of 3 more blind persons. 2 more blind persons participating in project activities as external experts were recruited. Or in summary, the work on the project was carried out by 7 blind people and 3 refugees from Ukraine. The team was trained to apply innovative storytelling approaches and methods in writing the articles published on BLINFO website. During the project, 11 exciting stories from the war in Ukraine were told from first person perspective and 12 more articles on different topics, which are valuable for the society of blind people, were also included. 5 interviews were also published, the purpose of which is to raise the better public image of Synergia Foundation and the NGO sector as a whole.
The project will achieve sustainability and long-lasting results, because the information and media portal BLINFO will continue to exist in the Internet space. All written articles about the war and the blind community will remain available and will continue to be available for reading both by the blind community and all members of our society. The published interviews with journalists, blind people, influencers and businessmen will also attract readers and change in a positive direction the image of the NGO sector, Synergia Foundation and the blind community, which will become more and more familiar to our society. The expert team, including persons with disabilities and including blind people from Bulgaria and Ukraine, improved their first-person narrative skills through innovative approaches and gained experience that remains precious to each of them, and they will use it again.