This activity of our association is carried out on the basis of a partnership that Nevo Parudimos has with the European network ERGO and involves several activities aimed especially at respecting Roma rights and increasing their participation in community decision making.
Within this collaboration, the Nevo Parudimos Association organized in 2017 a series of activities:
- The Roma Forum Meeting I (9-11 May – Bucharest ) with the theme ”The involvement of Roma NGO’s for Romanian Presidency of the EU in 2019”. More then 30 Roma NGO’s participated to the meeting and over 50 persons were present during the 2 days. In the same time, officials from National Roma Agency, National Roma Contact Point, National Federations of LAGs, representatives of Roma Education Fund, Ministry of Employment and Central European University had presentations and tackled Roma issues in open and free discussions.
- The Roma Forum Meeting II (4-5 dec. Bucharest) which was a working meeting in order to tackle several issues underlined in the meeting Agenda: the situation on National Roma Strategies, the involvement of Roma NGO’s for Romanian Presidency of the EU in 2019, Roma NGO’s and finance oportunities, youth roma involvement within the roma movement. More then 35 Roma NGO’s participated to the meeting and over 60 persons were present during the 2 days. The Ministry, Victor Negrescu presented the agenda of preparing the Romanian presidency and invited the Roma Forum to participate in all the meetings of 2018.
- Two trainings at Urziceni and Tecuci which ended with creating a training package targeted to the LAGs management team and local authorities roma and non roma NGO’s as future beneficiaries of the LAG’s. The training package includes 2 parts for 20 LAGs: social inclusion and effective communication in relation with the Roma community/ LAG; strategic development of the LAGs area considering several factors: social and economical education. More than 40LAGs increased their capacity to work with Roma people on CLLD process.
- The implementation of a quality audit that is a tool to involve Roma communities in the monitoring of CLLD, which at the same time strengthens their voice in the process, and to evaluate the quality of LDSs, both in terms of participation and results. The ‘Quality audit’ assesses to what extent LAGs involve Roma in the four phases of local development strategies: preparation, strategy planning, implementation and evaluation.
- Nevo Parudimos Participation to: Stakeholder Workshop ‘Building-up quality of life in the local area’ 16 May 2017 Brussels, Eurofound’s Brussels Liaison Office.
The key messages that can be extracted from our work done in 2017 are:
- To develop the Roma civil society in Rural Areas in order to become more active at local and regional level
- The Coalition (National Working Group) to be operational and function aiming to make lobby and advocacy for Roma communities
- The new LEADER program period to have the Roma more visible in all levels as partners, decision makers and beneficiary
- The use of EU funds for Roma inclusion to be made with a better qualitative impact and constant qualitative monitoring.
- The members of the NWG to have the capacities to react responding to policy makers with evidence based advocacy.
The most important conclusions and lessons learned from the actions from 2017 are that there is a need to inform and to capacitate the Roma civil society in order to be able to become a real dialog partner for the LAG’s to increase the involvement of the Roma in the implementing process of the LDS.
There is a need to work on the implementation of the CLLD principles and how they understand those principles for the increasing quality of life of the Roma communities of the rural/ urban areas. All our participants to the CLLD related trainings underline the fact that the informations received and the opportunity to meet with the representatives of the Roma community were very useful.. Unfortunately, the Roma communities are still hard to get and the principle to work with them is still up to down.
The National meeting and also the local meetings with the teams of the LAG’s were considered a success because both the national bodies and the local actors need a more strong and organized voice of the Roma community.
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This communication reflects only the views of the author and the European Commission can not be held responsible for the use of the information contained therein.
