2022-2026
Bulgarian Society Netherlands
There was no Bulgarian community in Groningen to join. No events, no network, nowhere to land. That absence is a thing you feel quickly as an international student, and there is a point where you either keep waiting for somebody else to fix it or you start it yourself.
A few of us started it in November 2022. Four years on it runs as one national organisation with a branch in each of eight cities, and I am still its treasurer.
Starting with nothing
No budget, no playbook, no audience. The first year of Bulgarian Society Groningen was working out what the thing even was by running events and seeing who turned up.
My half of that was external relations: partnerships and outreach, getting us in front of the other student organisations, the university, and the wider Bulgarian community in the country. An organisation with no track record has nothing to offer a partner except the argument that it is worth backing early, and making that argument over and over is most of the job.
It is also the first time I had taken on real organisational responsibility, and the pattern it taught has repeated in everything since: you commit before you feel ready, and the readiness arrives on the way.
Somebody has to own the numbers
In September 2023 I moved from external relations to treasurer. I had no formal financial training at that point, which mattered less than the fact that the society had outgrown being casual about money: it was running events, holding budgets and bringing in sponsorship.
There is a version of a student organisation that burns bright for two years and folds because nobody was watching the finances. That was the thing to avoid, and avoiding it is unglamorous work. Tracking what actually went out, forecasting the next term rather than the next event, and being the person who says no often enough that the organisation is still there the year after.
From one city to the whole country
By October 2023 what worked in Groningen was worth repeating, and the society stopped being a city association. The Bulgarian Society Netherlands is country-wide: one organisation for the whole of the Netherlands, with a branch in each of the cities and a national board over the top.
That is a different job from the one before it. Every branch has its own board, its own bank account and its own year, and every one of those boards changes annually. The national treasurer is not doing one set of books, but making nine organisations legible to each other and keeping them consistent as the people running them rotate out.
