Teodora Yordanova was thirteen when she left Bulgaria for boarding school in Switzerland. What she did not leave behind was her grandparents: her maternal grandfather, who stopped working at fifty-seven because Bulgaria's pension system could no longer support him, and grandparents in a rural village where a power outage was a real problem with no one to call. Visits home meant watching relatives navigate a healthcare system where insurance covered very little, leaving people uncertain about what treatment they could afford.
Teodora responded by building Warmth for Elders, a student-led initiative she designed, funds, and runs from another country. The project is an attempt to show that distance does not have to mean disengagement.
Identifying the Problem, Then Building a System
Bulgaria's elderly population faces pensions that have not kept pace with the cost of living, declining purchasing power, and a healthcare system that puts basic care out of reach for many people on fixed incomes. Beneath the financial pressure sits a quieter issue: isolation, with community often acting as the only informal support available.
Teodora's response started with research, not assumptions. She interviewed her own grandparents and ran a small focus group with them to understand what they actually needed. The answers were practical: basic household goods, hygiene products, food.
Running a charitable initiative from a Swiss boarding school for beneficiaries in Bulgaria meant she could not rely on an obvious playbook. A school fundraiser was her first idea, but it was not logistically workable since she had no infrastructure on the ground. She adjusted course, researching Bulgarian non-profits already serving elderly communities and reaching out to explore partnerships, several of which are still in early stages. One organization's model, distributing traditional Easter desserts to elderly residents for free, influenced how she thinks about the project: support that builds a sense of community, not just material aid.
For fundraising, she used the tools available to her: a GoFundMe campaign promoted through a QR code at Summerfest, a community event in Bulgaria, and a partnership with MetaSense Yoga Studio, a business with an existing track record of supporting causes its clients care about. The arrangement now funds part of her project and gives her a venue to talk with the studio's clients about the realities facing Bulgaria's elderly population. She tracks every donation and expense through a shared document, a simple but consistent system. So far, the initiative has raised more than €1,300, with more expected as outreach continues.
Teodora is candid that the project is still early. She has received appreciative feedback from at least one Bulgarian non-profit partner, and she is continuing to build relationships with others.
A Pattern That Shows Up Elsewhere
Before founding Warmth for Elders, Teodora spent a month working retail in Bulgaria, a job unrelated to elderly welfare on its surface but one that shaped how she now approaches the problem. She noticed that customers over fifty rarely came into the store, a small observation that reflects the broader decline in purchasing power among older Bulgarians. The job also gave her basic exposure to invoicing and financial recordkeeping, along with practice approaching people directly with a problem, a skill she now applies to outreach.
The same instinct, identifying an underserved group and trying to build something concrete for them, shows up in her other work. With a student venture called Interconnect AI, she helped develop the concept for Smart Sign Glasses, a wearable intended to translate sign language into spoken and written language in real time for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Her contribution was on the business and strategy side: she helped define the communication barriers the product would need to address, shaped the target market and pricing approach, and helped present the concept at the H-FARM innovation competition, where it was recognized among the stronger entries. The project remains at the concept stage.
She has also applied this thinking on paper. In the John Locke Essay Competition, a well-regarded international writing contest for pre-university students, she wrote on the question "Should We Fear a Cashless Society?" Her essay argues that a fully cashless system carries real risks: vulnerability to outages, reduced ability for people to opt out of digital finance, and increased concentration of power among governments and large institutions. The argument echoes the same question underlying Warmth for Elders: what happens to people that an efficient system overlooks.
What Comes Next
Teodora describes Warmth for Elders as a starting point rather than a finished model. Her stated goal is to develop it into a more consistent support system for elderly Bulgarians, and eventually into a registered nonprofit that could extend to other financially constrained groups. She is also interested in the longer-term question of how Bulgarian institutions think about an aging population that is often treated as a secondary concern.
She plans to study business, finance, and entrepreneurship, with the goal of building organizations that combine economic value with social impact. Based on what she has built so far, a cross-border initiative still in development, a recognized concept in accessibility technology, and a competitive essay on financial systems, this is a direction she has already begun to act on.
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