Strengthening inclusion skills of professionals in Roma inclusion

Systemic racism is a term coming from the US to describe every day, often hidden racist biases that create inequality and discrimination of certain social groups. This approach to promote inclusion in not yet common in CEE-Europe. To bring one example: segregated education of Roma children is researched thoroughly, policy tools are designed, school management issues are discussed, but teachers are rarely challenged e.g. on how their (hidden) lower expectations towards Roma students, manifested often only through nonverbal communication creates disadvantaged situation for these students. Our training is centred around equality, justice, and humanity. The workshops will help participants to unlearn, reflect, self-educate, and develop an awareness of existing oppression, racial beliefs, biases, and privileges and to develop and learn skills to be able to build a micro-environment that fights against these. It will also focus on how to be empowered to bring about change first within oneself and then within one's circle of influence and to identify and work to dismantle the three pillars of anti-gypsyism: self, culture, and systems. But of course, the training curriculum is not about to create blame, shame, or guilt.

The project had two main, interconnected objectives. The first was to raise awareness of various professionals of their (hidden) prejudices and stereotypes towards the Roma and its manifestation in everyday discriminatory actions. The second goal was to develop the competencies of those professionals who are aware of these prejudices and their practices consolidating inequality. We aimed to do this by developing tools and methods that strengthen inclusivity and improve the skills and competences of professionals working for/with Roma communities to be able to work in more inclusive manner. Awareness raising of hidden prejudices and institutional inequality, as well as the competence development of professional by more effective Roma inclusion tools and methods clearly serve the horizontal priority of “Inclusion and diversity”. The means to achieve these objectives was an innovative, new training curricula aiming at skill and competence development of a broad set of professionals working with/for the Roma, therefore the training will provide a high quality learning opportunity for adults.

The actual outcomes of the project was one detailed training curricula developed jointly by the partners, a training which aimed to support the awareness raising of hidden prejudices and institutional inequality, as well as the competence development of professionals. The training was piloted in the participating countries and finalised at the project by feeding back the experiences of the pilot trainings; an animation film subtitled in two languages. The film is an efficient tool for awareness raising if hidden prejudices and the institutionalised inequality resulting from these. An animation film has already been created by the lead applicant and used efficiently in the Hungarian context; the training curricula was tested in the participating countries with 60 participants by 4 pilot trainings; the concept of inclusivity training, the training curricula and the results were disseminated by 2 workshops and several other dissemination tools.

The concrete outputs: one training curricula developed, tested and finalized; 4 pilot trainings implemented; 60 professionals trained; 2 dissemination workshops implemented (30 participants). In addition, there were 5 Facebook posts, one article each in the Hungarian and Bulgarian mainstream media and a podcast in Hungarian. The animation film on systemic racism had Bulgarian dubbing. We also held a training session in Hungary for kindergarten teachers in the 8th district of Budapest and for volunteers from the Rosa Parks Foundation, in addition to the original commitment in the application.