February 26; the days after the year after...
Finally back with you, almost a year later... 🇺🇦🎗️
Happy Sunday, friends,
More than 10 months have passed since you last heard from me here. Truth is, throughout this whole time, I wasn’t able to find a meaningful way to share my usual and cheerful day-to-day stories and adventures, in the light of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Two days ago we commemorated the first anniversary of the day Ukraine was comprehensively attacked. Here in Bulgaria, we held a cozy little event with BG4UA, the pop-up ad-hoc relief organization that we cofounded with Ellie together with the leaders of several business organizations on the first day of the war. In my last update, 10 months ago, I shared some of the things we had managed to accomplish by that time. In the 10 months since, we finalized the funding campaign at approx. BGN 630,000, roughly equal to EUR 315,000, which allowed us to fund 18 NGOs that have collectively helped tens of thousands of Ukrainians in Bulgaria.
This has been a very difficult year. And yet, I’m glad and grateful we were able to come together on Friday with the team, partners, donors, NGOs, volunteers, and several Ukrainians who now live in Bulgaria, to celebrate life. I hope that going forward, February 24th will always be one of the two days every year in which we remember the horrors, but also celebrate the good that we have in common. The other day obviously being the day of Ukraine’s final, unconditional, and so much anticipated Victory over evil, which I’m convinced is upon us in a hopefully near future.
According to the Bulgarian government, approximately 200,000 Ukrainian nationals came to Bulgaria after 24.02.2022 and stayed for at least some time in our country. Approximately 50,000 remain today, and are likely to stay long-term. As far as BG4UA is concerned, now that our job is done and these 50,000 are documented, housed, and mostly in a good place when it comes to jobs, healthcare, and education, we have decided to continue our project by documenting and sharing the stories of everyone who was involved during 2022. We teamed up with the tremendously talented and creative team of The Recursive, to produce a number of video, audio, and textual stories, that we will be sharing in the coming months online at BG4UA.com. We hope that at some point, the -UA part of what we did will be behind us, but that BG4- will remain a lasting reminder of what we can be as a modern European society in Bulgaria; coming together and doing the right thing when it matters.
To lift the veil of this new BG4UA storytelling project, check out the trailer of our content series:
Also, make sure to hit the subscribe button in YouTube, as we’ll be adding much more to the BG4UA channel in the next weeks.
Now is the time for me to say thanks to all the incredible people that Ellie and I had the opportunity to work with. The board, consisting of BESCO chairman Dobromir Ivanov, MOVE.BG founder Sasha Bezuhanova, AIBEST representatives Milena Halacheva and Ilia Krustev, BVCA chairman Evgeny Angelov, BCause Foundation director Elitsa Barakova, and Zornitsa Mitkova from Teenovator who was our guiding light in communications. More than anything, I can never forget the original core team of volunteers, before there was ever a board, with whom we drank from the firehose of spreadsheets with thousands of lines, each one representing a person or family in need. Vessy Deyanova, Olya Nikol, Karina Khristich, Slaveya Nedelcheva, Antonia Tzenova, Val Ivanov, Milena Halacheva and Emilia Krusteva; you guys were an example to us, and I can never thank you enough for everything you accomplished.
Of course, a separate thanks to the hundreds of donors who so unsparingly donated funds to the BG4UA campaign. Many of you wish to remain anonymous, but we will never forget your generosity. Big gratitude also to America for Bulgaria foundation and Nancy Schiller personally, for their unwavering support, and the donation towards operational needs of BG4UA.
Finally, below are some photos of our event last Friday. Big kudos to DOM for hosting us, Baker Brothers and Orbelus for the delicious food and wine, Benjamissimo for the heavenly blue-and-yellow vegan chocolate desserts, the fantastic Kyiv couple Violetta and Nikita for the dance performance and DJing, and to Elbi Gatsov for the sound masterpiece he composed especially for the occasion. Daniel Nenchev, probably the finest voice in Bulgarian journalism; we couldn’t wish for a better MC and host than you. Olena Voloshyna is without doubt the best photographer I’ve ever worked with in Bulgaria, and we are so glad she could capture the event in pictures. And to all the NGO partners, like ZaDobroto foundation; words can’t describe the privilege we feel to have been able to be part of your work and journey. The reality is that we just mostly talked on the phone and went to lunches and dinners with people to secure funding and support, while you did all the literally physical heavy lifting of helping Ukrainians 24/7.
And now what?
I hope that after giving you this update, I can go back to my regular Sunday Max updates, with travel stories, and tales of the wondrous exploits of our ever-growing portfolio companies at Vitosha Venture Partners. Guess what, that portfolio got almost twice as big while I was away from Sunday Max, and now looks like this:
Lots of stories to share there, all in the next updates.
Oh and well, speaking of travel, despite the unbearably warm winter, Ellie and I did manage to ski for a couple of days last week, and it’s still fantastic as ever at 2700m altitude:
Be well and talk soon, happy Sunday! 😇