By Lina Jarad | Executive Director
On November 13-15 2020, BEST Foundation hosted its first regional tournament of the academic year, and its first large-scale virtual tournament ever! Just around 150 students from all over the west half of Bulgaria participated in the tournament. Professionals and university students from Bulgaria, the UK, the Netherlands and the U.S. acted as judges. We used Discord to run our main competition events and a few other team management tools to help with operations. 119th School in Sofia was kind enough to host BEST volunteers to work from its premises to run the “back staging” of the event. This was our first virtual event and so no external audience, partners or spectators were invited to ensure we have full security and a manageable troubleshooting system. The event went smoothly and paved the way for future tournaments. Sixteen teams attended the event, with students competing in each of BEST’s five events: Original Oratory, Duo Interpretation, Prose Interpretation, Poetry Interpretation, and World Schools Debate.
Just a week after our Fall West tournament, we had our Fall East tournaments for students from the Eastern region of Bulgaria. We took note of all the necessary technical changes in our systems and were able to keep the team’s momentum, especially that our ETAs were in the states and at this point were not officially part of our team, but kept volunteering with us to ensure the tournaments they planned for were carried out smoothly, at least for this one last time. We had 150 student participants and around 60 volunteer judges including a famous Bulgarian journalist. Our team of volunteers rented an airbnb and turned it into a working space to ensure we can run the event smoothly and can easily communicate with each other to schedule rounds and handle reports.
During the Fall 2020 semester, BEST’s Management Team (MT) consisted of a group of motivated and dedicated Bulgarians and Americans, all volunteers, who are responsible for all on-the-ground operations in Bulgaria. The MT included one full-time Executive Director, one Fulbright Fellow who served as Assistant Director, one Bulgarian volunteer who serves as Assistant Director, American English Teachers and Bulgarian BEST alumni volunteer coordinators, and student interns. Due to the pandemic, the Americans on the team had to move back to the U.S. thus our team has been reduced by half in the current Spring 2021 semester.
We still managed to hold a successful first tournament of the Spring 2021 season, which took place on Feb 19-21 (Spring West Regional) attended by 140 student competitors and 35 judges. Our opening ceremony had a guest speaker from the U.S. Embassy, our main sponsor for the event, and also a professor from American University in Blagoevgrad who who holds a PHD from Harvard in literature and has interest in poetry, one of the categories our students compete in.
Your support has made it possible for our team to continue its operations and planning during and in between events, and if you would like to continue to support us GlobalGiving is having a 50% matching campaign from March 9-14 for donations between $10-$50. Every little help counts and enables us to carry forward.
Thank you!
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