Connecting grassroot Roma women throughout Europe to raise awareness againts antigypsism and boost their leadership capacity

ended

The project ROMA CONNECT: Connecting grassroot Roma women throughout Europe to raise awareness against antigypsism and boost their leadership capacity aims to achieve the following objectives. The general objective is to empower and support the role of grassroots Roma women using an intersectional and bottom-up approach. We will create an international network of Roma women, so that they can have egalitarian spaces to support and learn from each other. The first specific objective is to foster rights awareness through capacity-building activities. We will have specific trainings, so that the participants can gain important tools that they can use in their activism, and in their daily life. The activities linked to this objective will be carried out in WP4. We want to ensure that we not only create egalitarian spaces through the women’s network, but that they also acquire important knowledge that builds new skills and enables them to face new challenges. The second specific objective is to build trust between Roma and non-Roma communities. Many of the inequalities that mark the lives of Roma women stem from racism, sexism and antigypsyism. These behaviors are shaped by negative prejudices about the Roma population. It is important to address these stereotypes, showing how little truth they hold, in order to build a more egalitarian society. This objective will be tackled through a public campaign. Each partner will hold 4 intercultural workshops with the non-Roma community in their areas. The campaign is included in WP2. The last specific objective is to have institutional impact, both at local, national (of all partners countries) and European level. An important part of the project is to engage with public institutions. We seek to have a positive impact at the political level; a space to which women have not been able to gain equal access. From a bottom-up approach, we want women to shape the stories and policies of institutions and not the other way around.