News

The Italian study visit of the PAIRS project was held from the 3rd to the 5th of April. It took place in the cities of Milan and Ferrara.

In Milan, Wednesday afternoon, the group visited the project called "Villaggio solidale" (The village of solidarity) run by CeAS in cooperation with Casa della carita.

The next day - on Thursday, there was two other site visits. The first one was on a programme for labour inclusion in the suburb of Rozzano and the second one to discover the settlement of Impastato street, in the outskirts of the city of Milan. 

The group also attended a music concert played by some Roma kids involved in a project about musical education. The performance took place during a meeting with Marco Granelli, the council member at the Municipality of Milan who is in charge for the Roma issue in the city.

The study visit continued in the town of Ferrara with visiting Multi-stakeholders network for the exchange of knowledge on the social inclusion of Roma People in the municipality. Even though the Roma population in the town is very small, the municipality is having a strategy for the integration. It was notable that members of the community were invited to participate in the meeting.

Another good integration practice that the international group visited was the Ricicleta employment model. Unemployment is a great problem in Roma communities around Europe, so such approach is highly relevant to the needs of the community. The small factory uses old bicycles, recycles them and produces new branded ones. The Ricicletta model is amazing and is on one hand self-sustaining because it uses old products (bicycles), but in the same time it can make profit out of selling the bikes. The best part is that the municipality actually supports the model created by another non-governmental organization which is very rare in Bulgaria for instance. Such model would be highly relevant to the Bulgarian environment. Such integration model has also an added value because it is environmentally friendly – it uses old bikes to make new and nicer ones that have the brand of the Ricicleta.

Educational support programme and after school activities was another good practice that was visited by the participants. It was very notable that the school only has 9 Roma children and it still uses targeted approach and develops learning plan for each child. A true sign of effort is that showers in the school were installed so the kids can be clean and not treated bad by other students just because they are dirty. A great component of the work is that a lot of volunteers are used in the different activities and they create a bridge between the school and the families.