Kinga Bereczki

 

Kinga Bereczki was born in Korond in Covasna County, Romania in 1966. She is the mother of three children,  two boys and a girl. She considers parenting as her main responsibility and this is, in fact, closely related to her career in community development.  Through community development she tries to create a safe and accommodating environment for future generations.

Beside her current tasks at the Covasna Community Foundation, she founded and is also currently director of the Eurocenter-Amoba Adult Training Centre. She started working as a mathematics professor in 1989 at the “Szekely Mikó” College and “Mikes Kelemen” Lyceum in St. George town. In between these posts she worked as the economy development manager at the ASIMCOV entrepreneurs association company and she was also a programmer at the Covasna County Regional IT Centre.
With all of the experience she has gathered through the years she considers building our own communities as the culmination of her previous responsibilities that led her to this place, to which she now dedicates all her knowledge and practice.

Organization: ´Covasna Community Foundation´, Romania

Fifty percent of the population of Covasna County, approx. 112,000 inhabitants, live in rural areas. Traditionally the region’s economy has been based on agriculture, and small farms and livelihoods are characteristic of this rural area. Despite urbanization, rural life is still important but it is very hard to prevent the negative effects of globalization from impacting the sustainability of traditional agriculture in this area: cultivation of potato, winter cereals, oilseed rape and sugar beet, and animal breeding (i.e. cattle, pigs, sheep). There is no strategic support of agriculture, farmers are forced to sustain themselves through their own resources based on agricultural knowledge inherited from previous generations. The rural area is very important to us, community development practitioners, because it preserves traditions and true values, in way of disappearing from urban life.

There is a need to return back to old practices regarding fruit tree cultivation. Native seedlings need to be planted and taken care of in rural areas. Native fruit trees are disappearing from villages; existing trees have to be saved and strengthened with new plantings.

There was a pilot project in which 250 plants were distributed to locals in a small locality, Magyarhermány, in Covasna County. The project was such a success that the foundation decided to extend the program to the whole county.