We knead joy!
Welcome! We are Nadezhda and Stefan Grigorovi, a family and the creators of NadEzhko!
NadEzhko is our good-spirited, adventurous, traveling hedgehog! His name means “to be above pricking others (above anger)”, and he is, indeed, a hedgehog with soft spines and a soft heart. NadEzhko teaches the children how to become good adults, and teaches the adults how to become good children again. We could translate the meaning of his name in English as “HedgeHope”!
NadEzhko is the name of our family company and the NadEzhko Social Bakery (social enterprise) in Sofia, Bulgaria, founded in 2014 and part of the Bread Houses Network. The company creates also various social, educational and game methods, services and products. The proceeds of all these support the social programs and free bread therapy of the Bread Houses Network, which Nadezhda initiated in 2009 and now connects more than a hundred people in about 20 countries on 5 continents.
The Bread Houses Network is a non-for-profit association, whose mission is to create and unite centers for community-building, creativity, and social entrepreneurship with the cause to inspire individuals and communities to discover their creative potential and cooperate across all ages, economic opportunities, disabilities and trauma, and ethnic backgrounds – all through unique collective bread-making methods and proven Bread therapy with accompanying art forms and sustainable ecological education.
Nadezhko Social Bakery – Sofia Bread House offers a wide variety of ecological, handmade sourdough breads and different ecological products from Bulgaria. In the bakery we train and employ people from vulnerable groups: orphans, long-term unemployed, mothers of many children. At Nadezhko, we offer diverse special paid programs, and the financial income from our paid services supports:
- our various social projects
- regular weekly free Bread therapy sessions with our proven methods helping people with disabilities, orphans, women victims of domestic violence, former prisoners; veterans; elderly homes and hospices; etc.
- regular weekly community baking events for mixed groups fostering social cohesion and integration across all ages and special needs
- Ovens for Peace program: uniting refugees and local people to make bread and share their diverse traditions in order to foster the refugees’ local social integration
Our social enterprise brand “NadEzkho” sends the message to avoid pricking others, to be above anger and rivalry. We translate the wordplay to different languages used by the organizations we cooperate with:
English: “HedgeHope” (hopping with hope over any hedge/difficulty)
German: “SchutzIgel” (similar to SchutzEngel – guardian angel)
Italian: “SorRiccio” (sorriso – smile; riccio –hedgehog)
And similar in other latin languages:
Portuguese: “SorOuriço” (sorriso –smile; ouriço – hedgehog);
French: SourHérisson (sourire –smile; hérisson – hedgehog).
That is why the mission and success of our social enterprise and social franchise model can be synthesized in our goal to help other companies and organizations become “hedgehopes” changing their communities by “selling” hope rather than simple bread or other products.
In the trainings in social entrepreneurship we offer through our Social Enterprise School (линк тук) we further employ the metaphor of the hedgehog to nurture the right spirit of a social entrepreneur. Building on the Hedgehog Concept developed by James Collins in his bestseller on business strategies Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, we have developed our complementary HedgeHOPE Concept on how to create successful social businesses.