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Description
With 12 Million people the Roma are Europe’s largest minority. In 2016 80% of them were at risk of poverty and 63% of Roma aged 16-24 were not in employment, education or training. Recent cases of hate speech and hate crimes from politicians, institutions and citizens e.g. in Ukraine, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, France and Italy show the severity of racism against Roma. Antigypsyism is the last “accepted form of racism” and contributes to huge social and economic disparities.
Our project brings together organisations who are rooted in local communities and have implemented successful projects that work on a small scale in local contexts. We aim at supporting Roma communities through implementing inclusion and empowerment projects that have proven to be successful in other communities. At the same time we want to create a more favourable environment for bottom-up approaches to Roma integration, breaking the vicious circle of cynicism that “nothing can be changed”.
The outputs of the project will be achieved through: community-led project planning inspired by good practices and supported through coaches from other Roma CSOs, a tailored capacity-building programme including peer learning and creative tools and evidence-based advocacy.
Summary of project results
The main aim of the project was to improve Roma inclusion and empowerment programmes by adapting good practices, focusing on bottom-up approaches and Roma civil society as agent of change. Roma across Europe are the poorest of the poor but so far integration strategies didn’t improve their living situation.
The project responded to the problem that Roma inclusion is often addressed through top-down approaches without involvement of the target group, leading to a lack of effectiveness that triggers frustration and cynicism among decision-makers and donors. The project wanted to show that successful practices developed by Roma CSOs do exist and can be adapted and up-scaled for use in other countries.
Project objectives were:
- To identify and promote good practices of Roma inclusion and empowerment projects from the grassroots level
- To adapt and implement good practices in local Roma communities with support of peers from other organisations
- To build the capacity of Roma CSOs on different aspects of project and organisational management
- To advocate for stronger support for bottom-up approaches to Roma inclusion from institutional and private donors
In this project a project market was organised during which 30 good practices projects in Roma inclusion were presented. Out of them 11 were implemented in all partner countries with support of a coach and funding from the project
The capacity of Roma civil society was strenghtened trough 3 learning academies where NGO people were trained in the topics which they chose before the trainigs, trough advocacy activities at national and European level, and through increased visibility which was done in the two social media campaigns. The project partners managed to put on the national and international agenda the importance of bottom op aproach in funding Roma inclusion.
Roma civil society was developed and strenghten- 10 Roma CSO''s have now advocacy strategies and they are more visible at national and international level.
A material about the importance of the bottom up aproach in funding was produced and was used and still can be used by civil society in their advicacy work.
The project has directly contributed to the social inclusion and empowerment of targeted Roma communities and in the long-term will indirectly contribute to the social inclusion of Roma in general through increased capacities of Roma civil society and better access to funding for community-driven inclusion and empowerment programmes.