Romania

Starting your own charity is never an easy task. There are many problems that could strike at any moment, and it is nowhere near your 9-5 job.

In 1990, Adrian Pascu-Tulbure’s parents set up British Romanian Connections and Adrian has been involved since 2004. Following the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, BRC was born as a simple organisation sending aid to orphanages and poor families. The aim was always to reach parts that bigger organisations couldn’t reach. Adrian and his family recognised that a major problem was the lack of foreign languages and awareness of other cultures.

Adrian says: “We concentrated on how to make Romanians better equipped for the new post-Communist era. Knowledge was the way out so we concentrated on the English language. While the educational system is actually pretty good, the main failing was teaching modern languages as they are actually spoken. Their teachers had learnt English and everything about the UK from a manual. There was no knowledge whatsoever of British culture.”

Back then, all they had to do to get started was register as a charity. Despite the ease of registering, BRC still faced problems in connection with people really understanding the cause. “It was occasionally difficult to sell the notion of ‘charity’ in Romania. Lots of people, at least initially, wondered who on earth these mad Brits were coming over, and whether we had any ulterior motives!”

“My family come from there [Romania], and it’s a cliché to say that it’s a way of “giving something back” but there’s certainly an element to that. Romanians haven’t been the best ambassadors for their country in recent years, and naturally we were to do what we could to fight that. Which means education.” The main marketing tools were word of mouth, local media and Career fairs. BRC was also partnered with schools with whom they worked closely. As a small scale organisation, they had at most ten full time members of staff which made the charity very approachable which helped as demand was always keen in the early days.

By 2006 when social media really took off, so did volunteering abroad and the focus was shifting away from Romania: “Romania wasn’t big news anymore. The kind of people who had gone there in the 90s were now going to India and Africa. In 2007 I started our Facebook page, which did get quite a lot of interest, especially as there was practically nobody doing that at the time. It fitted perfectly with our word-of-mouth, small scale ideal.”

However, demand for volunteers in Romania has declined. The country was extremely grim in the 90s, whereas now it’s a relatively prosperous country, at least ostensibly. The ‘hunger’ for British Culture is less now because it is easier to access; a decent proportion of middle-class children have Internet. Despite this, there is still a lot of poverty and low aspirations, especially in small towns and rural areas. Adrian also talks about ways charities can aim to survive the current economic state: “One thing which applies to all charities, large or small, is that you need to find innovative ways of raising funds. Without finds, charities wither away. You also need to have a very clearly defined purpose. For smaller charities, there is a huge amount of umbrella organisations which provide support whether it’s IT support or linking you up to other charities in the same area or on the same topic. Use them!

“By and large [the volunteers were] a hugely positive bunch: motivated and enthusiastic. The ones who were there purely to do something for their CV stuck out a mile off and not in a good way. But 90-95% of volunteers were absolutely top people. I also noticed that volunteers from very comfortable backgrounds tended to be the ones who were least perturbed by roughing it for a month or so.”

In hindsight, Adrian would have liked to set up an ‘English Village’: “It would have been interesting to buy some land in the countryside and set up some proper facilities. We set up an English Club in Piatra Neamt in the late 90’s, but especially around 1992 when land was cheap, an ‘English Village’ where the camps and schools could have taken place would have been amazing.” Despite BRC no longer running, it was one of the first volunteering abroad projects in the UK.

Over the years they have hosted over ten thousand British volunteers and over a hundred thousand Romanian children have gone through the charity. Adrian’s advice for anyone setting up a new charity: “Go for it, but you have to have clear aims and then be 100% behind them. It can be enormously rewarding but it’s never a 9-5 job. If you’re prepared to accept that, you’ll have a great time.”