Our Mission
A New ERA of Education, Resilience & Aspiration
What ERA Stands For
Education
Education that extends beyond knowledge — education that opens doors, creates experiences and reveals possibilities.
Resilience
The confidence to adapt, challenge limitations, learn from uncertainty and continue moving forward.
Aspiration
The courage to imagine a future beyond what seems immediately possible — and the opportunity to pursue it.
ERA was founded on a simple belief: young people should have the opportunity to discover their potential before being expected to decide their future.
Education can give us knowledge. But finding our direction requires something more — the opportunity to explore, experience, ask questions, meet people, challenge ourselves and discover possibilities we may never have known existed.
ERA exists to create those opportunities.
Our Story
It started in 2020 with a conversation between a group of friends.
We were discussing education, inequality and a question familiar to many young people: how are we expected to choose our future and achieve it when we have had so few opportunities to experience what that future could actually look like?
We saw the public educational system as capable of giving young people knowledge, but not the exposure, experiences and opportunities needed to understand where that knowledge could take them.
Access to those opportunities was also far from equal. For some young people, meeting professionals, visiting institutions, travelling internationally or participating in high-quality training was part of growing up. For others, those worlds remained distant.
We did not want to remain passive observers and wait for someone else to change that.
So we decided to build what we wished existed.
In 2021, that idea became ERA — a youth-led foundation created to expand the horizons of young people and make meaningful educational experiences more accessible.
What began as a group of friends with an idea has grown into a community built around curiosity, ambition and the belief that young people should be active participants in shaping their own futures.
Today, ERA creates opportunities for young people to step beyond traditional education: to enter institutions, meet professionals, participate in workshops and simulations, travel and learn internationally, develop practical skills and experience different fields first-hand.
We want to give young people the experiences, knowledge and confidence to choose that path for themselves.
Our Vision
We envision a generation of young people whose ambitions are not limited by their background, geography or lack of exposure to opportunity.
A generation that has the knowledge, experiences and confidence to ask: “What could I become?”
That is the new ERA we are working to create.
Our Founders
Petroslava Bratanova
Co-Founder & Co-President
Growing up in Bulgaria and attending a mathematics-focused secondary school, Petroslava was driven to explore opportunities beyond those immediately around her. Without easy access to mentors and professional networks, discovering what possibilities existed and understanding how to pursue them often required navigating the process independently — asking the right questions, seeking out the right people, and learning by trial and error what many of her peers elsewhere took for granted. That experience shaped an idea that would later become central to ERA: access to guidance, exposure and opportunity can profoundly influence the direction a young person believes is possible for themselves.
Petroslava later continued her education at Sciences Po Paris, pursuing her interest in international affairs and the complex challenges facing contemporary societies. Alongside her studies, she interned in key policy institutions across Paris, Brussels and Washington, D.C., including the European Parliament, UNESCO, think tanks, ministries and embassies. These experiences exposed her to different policy environments, international perspectives and approaches to addressing complex global challenges. They also showed her, first-hand, the value of entering new environments, learning directly from professionals, and encountering paths that can be difficult to understand or imagine from the outside looking in.
It is this conviction — that opportunity should not depend on where you happen to start — that led Petroslava to co-found ERA, with the goal of giving young people the guidance, exposure and confidence she once had to build for herself.
Elitsa Chavdarova
Co-Founder & Co-President
At present a Finance student at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Elitsa has always been a firm believer in the power of education and its ability to change lives. Her interest in finance grew alongside a parallel passion for art, and she has long been drawn to the space where the two intersect — where structure and creativity can work together rather than in opposition.
As someone interested in both disciplines, Elitsa is especially keen on using creative methods and modern mediums to deliver educational content in a way that feels fun, accessible and engaging, rather than distant or overly academic. She believes that the way knowledge is presented matters just as much as the knowledge itself, and that young people are far more likely to engage with ideas — financial literacy included — when they are invited in through formats that feel relevant to how they already learn and communicate.
This belief in accessible, creative education is what drew Elitsa to co-found ERA alongside Petroslava, where she works to ensure the organization’s content and approach resonate with the young people it aims to reach.
ERA Foundation 