Description
The project "Arguments against discrimination" is a project addressed to young promising Roma, which aims to offer them an elite personal development program which would help them become vocal actors in the face of discrimination and at the same time would propose them as role-models for other young Roma. The project target group is represented by a team of 15 Roma high school students, carefully selected from a larger pool of applicants. The main tools used in this project would be academic debate and argumentative writing. The project is necessary because it tackles discrimination from a new and unusual perspective which is complementary to the classical approaches to tackling discrimination and racism. The result of this project will be the formation of a group of young Roma leaders, active and vocal against discrimination. The 15 young Roma are expected to benefit directly.
Summary of project results
The formal education system in Romania does not actually educate future citizens to be aware of democratic values, respect human rights and the rights of minorities. In the world of nongovernmental organisations advocating for the rights of minorities is common knowledge that schools are some of the most discriminatory institutions. In this context, the young Roma (or their parents) decide many times that the best solution is to not declare their ethnicity or their position by accepting silently and being submissive when exposed, directly or indirectly, to situations when they are disadvantaged or discriminated against. The public voices that condemn racism and discrimination belong mostly to the leaders of nongovernmental organisations for protection of human rights/minorities. The youth do not manifest initiative in this sense and this is a worrying problem. The project was addressed to young promising Roma and aimed to offer them an elite personal development programme which would help them become vocal actors in the face of discrimination and at the same time would propose them as role-models for other young Roma. The project involved three main components around which were organised club activities: 1. Debates: preparatory work was carried out almost weekly, leading to a total number of 41 such meetings; they had both a theoretical and a practical approach - if at the beginning of the project, the debate meetings have followed the structure of training sessions, teaching the participants about the contents and the techniques of argumentation, up until the end the meetings became true matches of debate arbitrated by the instructor, which gave them constant feedback. 2. Evening stories with representatives of Roma ethnicity: during the project, important Roma people (but not only) visited the club to talk about how they managed to overcome obstacles and the attitudes they adopted to become community leaders. 3. Argumentative writing: in the debate club (called Shukar Club), young people have learned to construct, write and illustrate argumentative texts through 5 sessions of workshops on various subjects: "The Power of Media", "Power Text", "The Power of the Argument" "The power of Stories", "The power of Visual". All these skills were used subsequently to write 52 articles which are now published on the collective blog of the project.
Summary of bilateral results