The Club “Sustainable Development of Civil Society” is an apolitical, non-governmental and non profit organization founded in 1997 with the goal to unify the efforts of some fellow members of Bulgarian Universities and scientific Institutes for introducing new sustainable approaches to social activities in Bulgaria. Nowadays the members of this NGO are 30, most of them with background in economics, engineering and social sciences.

Our mission is to contribute to the democratisation process by strengthening the social dialogue, to assist municipalities in their work on regional strategies and project development and to introduce the environmental issues as a part of the whole policy for sustainable development and transition to market economy.

Since 1997 we developed a number of projects, financed by different organizations. We started our international collaboration with Romanian colleagues from the UNESCO chair of the Bucharest Polytechnics University and the “Black Sea University”. We participated several times to their activities related to the industrial development and environmental protection in the Black Sea region (Mangalia) and Danube delta and were invited to perform a common project, related to policy development for Danube region.

We use to work close with Universities, because we are persuaded the notion of sustainability should be introduced at a very early stage of educational programs. We participated to several common projects with Bulgarian and foreign universities related to the tourism development and heritage conservation. We use to include women and minorities in our target groups because they are among the most affected by the transition process and need assistance and support.

We are persuaded that environmental topics should not be separated from the general topics related to the sustainable development of our society. In each development project and business planning process we should introduce environmental impact assessment and environmental management activities. Our team first in Bulgaria have elaborated a Project for EMS of polluting furniture industry (1988) and have conducted a huge research of industries’ needs of EMS ISO 14001 implementation. We have carried out series of seminars on EMS implementation and provided the first Bulgarian translation of the standard ISO 14000.