Project Description
Europe: A Homeland for the Roma is a project aimed at increasing the visibility of the Roma’s quest for equality and acceptance and increasing the employability of a group of Roma and non-Roma journalists from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia by providing them with advanced multimedia storytelling skills and publication opportunities.
Conceived by Transitions, a Prague-headquartered media development organization and Internet publisher, the project is being implemented between November 2012 and October 2014 in close cooperation with six partners in Europe and the United States, the Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ) in Budapest, the Center for Independent Journalism (CJI) in Bucharest, Romea in Prague, the Media Development Center (MDC) in Sofia, MEMO 98 in Bratislava and the School of Communication at the University of Miami, whose Professor Rich Beckman served as chief trainer and executive producer for the project.
Building on the success of the Colorful but Colorblind project—which in 2010 and 2011 gathered 50 Roma and majority-community journalists from the five countries in Central and Eastern Europe—Europe: A Homeland for the Roma is a collaborative effort to counterbalance the stereotyping and scapegoating of Roma, which has been exacerbated in recent years. The project does so primarily by creating and widely disseminating a large volume of multimedia content on issues facing the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe.
