On 21-st April 2021 members of the board and a volunteer of Alzheimer Bulgaria Association met a member of the European Parliament – Mrs. Tsvetelina Penkova and her political advisor Mr. Nikola Mitov. Mrs. Penkova briefly presented her activity in the European Parliament, mainly focused on economics and finances. She is the first Bulgarian MEP to participate in a discussion about the challenges faced by people with dementia on a European level by joining an Alzheimer Europe‘s workshop in February this year.

We presented our activities: mission, main purpose, and ideas. We were proud to inform her about our increasing volunteer team, which participates in spreading information about dementia and the challenges of the affected families, trainings, seminars, meetings, and drafting project proposals. We briefly described our main projects and recent events: our collaboration with the 5km Run on the Let’s Outrun Dementia Together initiative as part of the global Dementia Friends movement, The Generation Dialogue project, Digital Grandson, eLily, 3D4Elderly and others. Tsvetelina Penkova showed interest in joining the 2021 dementia runs in Sofia and Plovdiv aimed at prevention of dementia and raising public awareness. She will also consider collaborating on the project for 3D printing for adults.

The meeting was a success. We believe both sides learned new things and we found that we could cooperate in various projects related to priority areas such as innovation, green policy, and digitalization.