Our mission is very straightforward:

We provide meaningful work and day time activities in our centre and also in the community for young people with disabilities with the aim/intention to:

Enrich their Lives; Unfold their potential and Become Active Citizens.

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Our wider mission is that Harom Galamb’s work, together with other social service providers, will make an impact on the quality of life of people with disabilities, including their poverty levels in Romania which is judged to be the highest in the EU.

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Our Vision

Our vision is to build up and maintain a small but diverse social care provision which provides vulnerable young adults with those necessary elements in life (meaningful work and work experience, social integration, a sense of belonging, increased independence, increased skills and confidence), which are the stepping stones into adulthood.

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We ground our vision by offering a diversity of varied meaningful work to provide real-time choices: weaving; wool processing; gardening; cooking and baking; food processing; household activities. The work and training aspects of our service are complemented by social and therapeutic inputs including art, music and dance, with further one-to-one therapeutic support when it is beneficial. We provide a common meal time each day, which of itself provides opportunities for meaningful work in cooking and catering.

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We involve the young adults in community sponsored events like celebrating the Christian festivals, organising social and cultural events, and participating in group outings.

 

Zsuzsa: My way to Camphill... A personal reflection​

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I was in 10th grade, year 1996, when a friend of ours heard of Camphill and decided to go there. He became a volunteering co-worker in Ringwood, Sheiling Schools. The following year, my sister, Agnes Soo finished high school and went to Ringwood as well.

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I had one more year until my A levels, at that point and I was keen to study, however family circumstances didn’t seem to allow me to start my studies. Therefore, I also applied to Ringwood with the aim to gain a different experience, learn English and possibly save up some of my pocket money to be able to start my studies. Some relatives questioned the decision to send me away to England, rather than support me at my studies and my mum gave me the choice after all.

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I chose to stay home and try the entry exams to the university of law. I failed, because I started too late, but in the course of that year I managed to get a scholarship to the Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Budapest and in 1999 I started my studies in Law and Political Sciences.

During my 2nd year of studies, I went to visit my sister in Ringwood, where I spent a month and joined life there as full as possible. It was a very deep experience and I left with the conviction that I got to make time for a year of volunteering in Camphill.

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This time had come in 2003-2004, when I spent a year in Cairnlee House, in Camphill Schools Aberdeen, Scotland. The time spent there was a formative time, where I felt reconnected to many of my talents and interests that I had left dormant during my studies and city life, I truly enjoyed the social and cultural aspects of community life and felt so happy and accomplished. I knew if I had closed my studies already, I would just stay on.

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Stephanie Newbatt said good bye to me with the words: I wish I had you back! This sentence followed me in the years to come, when I couldn’t reconnect anymore to the things I was doing before.

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I started a PhD, then I went to do a Master in European Law in Göttingen, Germany. After 5.5 years of searching my new path, I woke up with an inner vision of a warm orange house swimming in sun light. It was on a hill and I knew it was a Camphill house and it stood on a hill around my home place. That was it! I knew what I wanted and needed to do. Not long before I had met Mitko, my future husband and we decided together, after a visit to Cairnlee, that we will move there in order to learn and experience as much as possible until we feel ready to move back to Romania and create a place there for people with special needs.

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We spent 12 years in Scotland, working with young adults and being involved in all aspects of community life: life-sharing, care and home life, workshops, culture and festivals, volunteers’ support and supervision, leadership and management, therapies and medical support. It was a broad and deep experience, while also getting married and having 3 wonderful children and guiding them in their early years in a Camphill setting.

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In 2017, we bought a property together with my mum in Porumbenii Mici, a village just 5 miles from my birth town in Romania. In the same year, Istvan Balazs, the father of Blanka, who was to become one of our first young people at Harom Galamb, called us for a conversation. Blanka was going to finish school in 2019 and they were searching for a solution for her next step. There was nothing available for Blanka in the region. Istvan offered his financial support, if we returned and started our project. We committed to move back in 3 years’ time and use that time as a period of preparation for the start.

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Thus in 2018, the Association Harom Galamb was founded. The first piece of land was bought in Advent 2018 and the 2nd lot at Eastertime 2019 with the funding of the Csiga Biga Foundation, with the mediation of Istvan Balazs and Ildiko Illyes, Blanka’s mum.

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Architectural plans were developed for the project with the guidance of James Hornby (Jim) and the architect couple Zsolt and Kinga Varday. Our core group for developing the vision were: Agnes Soo, James Hornby, Dimitar Filipov-Soo (Mitko) and myself, Zsuzsa Filipov-Soo.

In February 2020, the Harom Galamb Scotland SCIO had been founded with the intention to become a supportive body to our work in Romania both professionally and in fundraising. The first trustees, who recognized the importance of our intention and decided to devote time and energy towards us, were: Ann Watt, James Hornby, John Richards, Laurence Alfred.

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In the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID, we packed up our life in Cairnlee and moved to Romania. This transition was supported by Camphill Schools Aberdeen and the Camphill Social Fund. The first 10 months, Mitko still stayed in Scotland. It was a very hard and yet, very special time, starting to involve the first volunteers, clearing out the garden, the old house, starting some of the refurbishment and at last in Spring, 2021 have Blanka Balázs and Enikő Imecs start to attend activities. 

We started in our family home. While my children were in school, they had their activities in our house and the garden. Now, 7 years down the way, there is a house taking shape on the hill in the Harom Galamb garden. It will be blue, but no doubt, it is that house from the vision that came to me in 2007, in Göttingen, on a peaceful morning.

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What gives me so much strength? – many people ask me. It is a call that I said yes to. It’s an inner certainty that I am on my path, where I am to use all the gifts I was given and all the learnings that I was allowed to gain through the years before. 

 

My law studies, understanding this administrative world, the languages (English, German, Romanian beside my mother tongue, Hungarian), the experiences I made by living in different places and cultures, community life and the way life sharing chiselled my corners and raised my ability to accept the other and seek the best in every human being, deep connection to Christianity and the values it represents in the world and a strong will that has been shaped by hard and perseverant work. But most of all the wonder and joy that people with special needs allow me to experience day by day.