New solutions

With 12 Million people the Roma are Europe’s largest minority, and its most discriminated one. Antigypsyism is the last ‘accepted form of racism’ and contributes to huge social and economic disparities.

There has been progress in identifying the causes of social exclusion of Roma, but when it comes to designing solutions, we face a general paralysis on how to tackle the multi-layered challenges. Top down approaches – developed far from the communities – leave little room for innovation. Practitioners agree that grassroots approaches work and bring good results for social inclusion and human rights, but most donors are still reluctant to support such small-scale initiatives.

Our prject brings together organisations who are rooted in local communities and work successfully on a small scale in local contexts. Our consortium spans from Lithuania to Turkey, including Roma CSOs from inside and outside the EU.

Our project aims at supporting Roma communities in adapting and implementing inclusion and empowerment projects that have already been tried and tested successfully by other partners. 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’.