Bucharest        The Roma people constitute about 12% of the Romanian population with between 1.8 and 2.2 million people disbursed across the country, even though official census figures number only 600,000.  Their minority status has led to intense discrimination in the region for hundreds of years.  We were meeting with Alin Banu, the Executive Director of Roma for Democracy and his associate, Nicu Dumitru, who handles affairs with the EU and other projects within the organization, so we could better understand the current situation for Roma.

Roma for Democracy has been the name of the organization for less than two years, as a successor to previous formations. The organization now was focused more on community organization and citizen participation in Roma communities.  Alin and Nicu explained to us that they had been working in more than 100 communities of the over 200 in the country, but were concentrating their work now on four of the largest.

After Romania’s entry into the European Union in 2007, there was legislation to prevent discrimination, but the process of implementing these rights is difficult and ongoing.  For example, in any community where more than 20% of the population is Roma special provisions around hiring and other entitlements are triggered.  In practice what this has meant is that some mayors have unilaterally dictated that only 19% of their populations are Roma in order to escape these provisions.  They have been able to do so by manipulating the census or not bothering to count in Roma areas at all.  We wondered if there had been legal actions filed by the Roma or nonprofits like theirs that are dedicated to Roma rights.  It seemed that had not been done yet even though the organization had done pilots with parallel census counts with volunteers so had evidence of the distortion.

Part of Roma for Democracy’s work has been to increase voting in local and other elections.  This has made a difference in turnout that they are able to establish in a number of communities.  One young man who emerged from their leadership development programs has now been elected as the youngest mayor in the country.  Political education has also been important, since many Roma have been attracted to the populist messages of far-right parties in the country, making their work even harder.  Much of this leadership work is done by one of their partner and affiliate organizations, REF, the Roma Educational Fund.

Roma for Democracy has paid a price with attacks on the organization and its offices.  When we arrived, Alin met us in the driveway, because an iron gate blocks the entrances now because they had to install new security measures.  Moving inside and from floor to floor now involves a special key card issued to their employees to keep intruders out and isolate them.

This kind of resistance, as well as the challenges of funding from the European Commission and the reductions of support over the years from George Soros Open Society Institute, have diminished the ranks of Roma nonprofits in the region, so they felt fortunate to still be able to do the work by focusing on specific communities and their empowerment via community organization, mainly involving advocacy.  They gave us a vivid example of the funding challenges saying if a community wanted a park, it might take 5000 euros if the money came from the European Union because of the bureaucracy and paperwork as opposed to 1000 euros if the money came more streamlined from the European Commission, yet with Open Society they could have put it all together with 200 euros.

We started on a wrong foot based on misconceptions of what they thought so-called “American community organizing models” were, but we ended up pledging to keep in touch and work more closely together, once they understood better what real community organizing was.