For another year, in partnership with the Information Portal for NGOs in Bulgaria, we organised the competition for an essay on the theme "Why is my organisation important for people?". The name of the contest "Of NOGs and People" is a challenge to civil society organisations to use human, understandable language in communicating with people.

The awarded texts are "The Battle for a Clean Struma River" by Lyudmila Dobreva from the "Clean Struma" Association and "Go, Answer, Go! Or how to encourage reading" by Gergana Dimitrova from the Children's Books Foundation. The essay "Why my karate club is important" by ten-year-old Ida Sartini from the Ronin Karate Club receives an incentive award from the NGO Portal. The organisations of the winning essays receive a prize of BGN 500 and the incentive prize is BGN 300.

This year we received 27 essays. Members of the jury were Raina Gavrilova, lecturer on history and theory of culture at the Faculty of Philosophy at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski, an author of books, articles and textbooks on history, anthropology and cultural studies, and Tamara Valcheva, a journalist from Capital who writes on culture, society, human rights, social entrepreneurship, feminism, tackling racism and hate speech. As in previous years, the criteria by which they evaluated the received texts were:

• human language of writing;

• clear and understandable presentation of the organisation and its importance to people;

• an interesting and moving narrative.

We thank all participants in the contest! We believe that the ability to tell a clear and exciting story about the work of our organisations is important to attract supporters, volunteers, partners, and donors.

See a conversation about the contest, the results, the arguments of members of the jury, the impressions of Maria Petkova, Director of Tulip Foundation, and Georgi Genchev, Head of the NGO Portal team.