Roma communities all across the Europe are experiencing long lasting social exclusion and extremely high level of discrimination on a daily base. Many generations of Roma have been dreaming for societies where Roma are equal citizens by responsibilities but also by the opportunities. Nowadays` Roma generation still remember the institutional and structured discrimination started many decades ago culminated during the WW2, continued during the communist regimes with many form of ostracism even sterilization of Roma women. This deeply rooted discrimination is taking place even nowadays in cases as segregation in schools, forced evictions, racially motivated cases of killing Roma, widely spread hate speech, police register, racial profiling etc. One of the nowadays challenges of Europe is to ensure inclusion and equality of all its citizens, including the Roma.

Having in regard the frame of Roma communities. in context with the youth work sector and Erasmus + program, many Roma and Non Roma youth associations target Roma to work with, which proves that 1/3 of projects targeted Roma, have firstly to research the needs and issues, provide youth work and services that will motivate the Roma young people to take part at local and international activities. The gap between youth associations and the Roma young people is evident. Based on our experience at local and international level and the conducted researches it was shown that Roma young people are especially interested in activities where they can learn about their History, culture, identity, Human rights – discrimination and Holocaust. One of the comments from the evaluation of the project dedicated to Roma empowerment: Building capacity of youth workers to fight discrimination against Roma” was: I have spent 16 years in schools, had no opportunity to learn about Roma even 1 min. The low level of participation of Roma either at local or international level can be explained through the lack of experience of youth associations in working with Roma young people and absence of training manuals and other intellectual outputs with methods and tools, researches and good practices that provide knowledge, skills and attitudes to work with Roma young people.

In fact COE has produced manuals and there isn’t any intellectual output produced by youth associations that tackle Roma young peoples` interests and needs. This situation directly causes the low level of competences of the youth workers and the capacity of youth organizations to respond upon this challenge. Moreover the lack of competences also corresponds with the few Erasmus+ projects where directly Roma young people are participants which is in contrast with having many Erasmus+ projects expecting the multiplying effect to be on Roma but not having Roma young people as direct beneficiaries

Youth Exchange and Training Course