RRI Tools as a project is coming to an end, as all other good things do, but partnerships will endure beyond the project lifetime and the RRI Community in Bulgaria will continue to grow. And this is precisely what happened at the last training session organized by the Bulgarian-Romanian RRI hub on 19 December in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The name of the event was “RRI legacy in Bulgaria - pay it forward”. Leaving a legacy means you entrust a dear thing to the secure hands of its successor. That is why we chose to leave RRI as a legacy to the oldest higher education institution in Bulgaria - Sofia University, St Kliment Ohridski, educating the future scientists, engineers, policy makers - citizens.

Invited by the Faculty of mathematics and informatics to organize a training session on the RRI Toolkit, we have established a promising partnership in order to collaborate and cooperate in bringing science closer to the society in Bulgaria.

Together with professors, lecturers and assistants, we have dived deep into RRI waters to discover a wealth of RRI tools gathered on the platform rri-tools.eu.

The RRI Tools leaflet is available in Bulgarian on RRI Tools media room.

We discussed RRI opportunities in Horizon 2020, we went through how to “incorporate RRI in higher education institutions” and how to “design an RRI-oriented project proposal” and had a look at the self-reflection tool. Information about enRRIch and HEIRRI projects, promoting integration of RRI in formal and informal education, was also presented.

The training helped us all reflect on the opportunities RRI could bring us now and in the future. It equipped us with knowledge and tools on how to apply RRI not only in our daily practice but also to pay it forward, as it is the only way we will keep the RRI community growing.

Petya Gancheva

Petya Gancheva works on the RRI Tools project at Ruse Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Bulgaria, the RRI Tools Hub for Bulgaria and Romania.