Following two days of exploring the potential for engaging citizens in Bulgaria even with our limited knowledge of the specific Bulgarian context for Responding Together, there were certain challenges that immediately leapt out: our representatives from local authorities and social service agencies could not identify much citizen activity in combating precariousness; the participative measures that are in place seem largely ineffective and defunct; public councils are not attracting a wide cross-section of regional or local community members (only one in six of the large regions of Bulgaria have a representative for the protest groups in the February protests that led to the fall of the government); community reading centres are not perhaps as popular as they could be; lists of civil society organisations with contact details are out-of-date and rarely consulted; and there is very little facilitation or coordination of volunteers. If you throw into that equation disillusionment with EU funding, distrust of and between NGOs and local, regional, national and supranational governments, and low incomes, unemployment and increasingly difficult social conditions, it is hardly surprising that optimism and hope to build social initiatives through interaction between citizens and local government look difficult to sustain.

These challenges provoked a great deal of debate and exchange of ideas over the two days. Founder Rui Sà-Carneiro's example of Caxias Associação Social in Portugal gave insight into mobilising resources from the beginnings of just a small group of volunteers. The existence of volunteer activity and initiatives in Bulgaria countered some of the pessimism in citizens getting actively involved, and enabled the question to be raised if such social initiatives could be carried out in Bulgarian local communities. From this beginning we were able to ask how to mobilise the citizen potential to enable that to happen. Director of the European Anti-Poverty Network Bulgaria, Dr. Maria Jeliazkova's workshops to explore the impact of the financial crisis on institutional capacity to interact with civil society, and the particular local contexts of evolving poverty and precariousness in Bulgaria, posed the additional questions of how to involve citizens from different and often vulnerable backgrounds in reducing inequalities, and how to build trust among different social groups and local authorities.

Ultimately participants were absolutely right that unless there are albeit small-scale actions driven by citizens that complement and reinforce local authorities' services, talk of building trust, including a diverse mix of people pro-actively engaging in tackling their and others' problems relating to poverty and precariousness, and mobilising more citizens to contribute and collaborate, will remain just that: nice words and concepts that have no practical application to speak of. The first step in this difficult and challenging process would be to nurture existing volunteering and socially aware actions to inspire attracted observers and generate self-belief that we can make a difference. Amidst all the questions posed, I don't think there is much doubt that the potential is there.