EASPD Secretary General Luk Zelderloo ended his participation in the National Forum with a strong emotional message of unity and belief in success: ‘Social services in Bulgaria must speak with one voice, a powerful voice! You must find a way to implement the new legal framework for social services in your country. I am very happy to have had the opportunity to work together with you in this direction over the past years.’
Luk Zelderloo has been working on improving the quality of services in Europe for more than 25 years. He previously worked in a centre for visually impaired children, in a centre for children with intellectual disabilities, and was director of a similar facility. Over the years he has worked hard to find new approaches aimed at improving poor living conditions by calling for changes in legislation and regulations. With a sense of humour, Zelderloo, who was honoured by NASO with the title ‘Ambassador for Partnership and Success’, told interesting and enlightening stories of his professional experience and shared his success formula.
‘If you want to be successful, you need vision, you need skills, you might have to organize incentives, you need resources, and you have to plan. As they say if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. He stated that none of these factors should be lacking, because ‘if there is no vision, then you will have confusion; if there are no skills, then your people will go nuts; if you do not have incentives, then there will be resistance; if you do not have resources to oil the machine, then there will be a lot of frustration; and if you fail to plan, then you will have a false start and you will never arrive where you want to arrive’.
