Andreea Nistor and Simona Beldiman are Alumni of our Social Innovation and Management Programme 2025. Together, they created a campaign to tackle one of Romania’s most pressing issues: functional illiteracy. Their campaign is a showcase of how inter-organizational cooperation can amplify social impact and how cross-sector partnerships can work best. We have talked to them in this short interview to find out more about the cooperation!
Dear Andreea, dear Simona, please give us a little introduction on yourselves and your organisations.
Andreea: In the last 15 years, I initiated and scaled award-winning education programs which have changed life opportunities for thousands of youths and children in Romania. I have a passion for collective impact, resource and stakeholder mobilization, having raised and invested >20 million EUR for projects in the last 10 years alone.
Simona: Having dedicated over 17 years to the nonprofit sector in Romania, my professional journey has been deeply rooted in developing of the NGO sector in Romania, being a pioneer in the area of sustainable fundraising practices. At the end of 2021, I took on a new and exciting challenge as the Executive Director of Fundația Bosch România/Bosch Romania Foundation, a foundation that is at the beginning of its path. The Foundation is a non-governmental organization, created at the initiative of the Bosch Group in Romania, with the aim of developing a framework suitable for the expansion of its social responsibility actions.
You met at the Social Innovation and Management Programme 2025. What moment or conversation made you realize you shared a similar mission or challenge?
Andreea: Simona and I traveled together by plane from the first session. Networking and socializing time spent on the plane during lunch, breaks and organized evening events shaped our relationship, conferring unprecedented professional inspiration, capability to mobilize resources together, courage of perspectives and time to reflect and plan our new initiative.
Simona: Even though we knew each other before the programme, and I had always admired Andreea’s professionalism, the Social Innovation and Management Programme gave us the space to truly connect on a deeper level. It allowed us to slow down, reflect, and really understand not just what we were each doing in our organizations, but why we were doing it. My project focused on illiteracy, and I was already familiar with the valuable work Andreea’s organization was doing through the generatiasmart.ro platform. During the programme, as we presented our projects and explored different approaches, I began to clearly see how our efforts could complement each other. And to be honest, the real plan to continue working together took shape during a lunch in the final module.
From that, a collaboration was born: the campaign “Fitness for the Mind”. What is it about, and what problem or need inspired you to create it together?
Andreea: In a world where beauty and physical look are ruling over our concerns, we can only train our youth for the future if we develop their reading and critical thinking skills and capabilities for an independent mind. Hundreds of school libraries were closed down in the past years and contemporary, new books are more expensive than what average families in Romania can afford.
It is our vision, that teaching children how to read or write and also how to think cannot be the responsibility of the school alone, but of the whole ecosystem around children. This project is therefore a collective impact initiative – focusing not on one reading project of a single nonprofit organization, but on the mission which is now shared by more than 10 NGOs, publishing houses, and culture institutions.
What strengths did this collaboration bring out? And what challenges did you encounter while working together?
Andreea: Many NGOs in Romania find themselves in a “silo-based competition”. Simona is however authentically driving the culture of Bosch Romania Foundation into a truly remarkable direction. She is a great supporter of the collective impact vision, which she sincerely lives and inspires others to do so too. Understanding that no one single organization can mobilize to reach all children in this country is key to strategic partnerships. The uniqueness of this project relies on our shared values: “we can reach more kids if we stand together”. It is impressive how this selfless and non-competitive approach brought so many other NGO partners together: everybody working almost for free and everybody working together. Simona’s vision for breaking competition between NGOs and publishing houses among themselves gave the spark to this project! The inspiration became contagious.
Simona: One of the greatest strengths of our collaboration was the way our perspectives complemented each other. Andreea brings strategic clarity, structure, and an impressive ability to translate ideas into effective plans, she is truly the master of organizing. Of course, we also encountered challenges. We invited other partners to join, publishers, libraries, NGOs, and corporate partners, which required coordination, alignment of goals, and careful planning. While this added complexity, it also strengthened the campaign, expanded its reach, and taught us valuable lessons in collaboration and partnership management.
What is one lesson from this partnership that you will take into future collaborations and why?
Andreea: The bolder and more courageous the idea, the greater the capacity to make people contribute and mobilize for the vision. When we first started the idea it was in our inspiration always going to be a national “catch all party” campaign. This is probably the one thing that mobilized the televisions, influencers and TV stars, the book authors and many others. Both of us, we immediately believed that this will truly be an unprecedented national mobilization.
It is also special how you can kick a brand-new project off if you put your best resources into play: a lot of time from us personally, best colleagues, generous budgets which Simona invested on behalf of the Foundation which made everything possible. We really prioritized this and it was not easy to make it take off in the middle of the year when many other projects were already open.
Simona: I’ve learned that when each partner’s unique expertise is recognized and organized effectively, as Andreea’s organizational skills showed so clearly, the collective impact is far greater than the sum of individual efforts. This lesson will guide me in all future collaborations: to invest time in understanding partners’ strengths, to communicate openly, and to create a shared vision that allows everyone to contribute meaningfully.
Thank you for sharing those insights with us. As we’re starting the new year, let me ask you one final question: what is one personal or professional goal you want to achieve in 2026 that connects to this collaboration?
Andreea: We will launch Fitness for the mind as a national campaign on February 4th (stay tuned). I would like to see 3.000 parents and teachers getting involved and reading to children at home and in schools. The project will take 2 months and I look forward to seeing it as a great success.
Simona: Personally, I am about to start the MSc in Social Innovation & Management at WU Executive Academy in Vienna (I will miss Andreea!), I hope to make the most of this experience, bringing new insights and skills that I can later apply to our ongoing and future collaborations.
Some fotos of Andreea and Simona during the three modules of the Social Innovation and Management Programme. © Igor Ripak