Workshop as a tool to raise awareness on diversity among Roma people in Poland

By HIA Fellows: Ankur Doshi, Katarzyna Klimowicz and Nara Narimanova

 One of the highlights of our experience in the HIA Poland’s program was the output phase – the ability for us fellows to actively learn about human rights issues in Poland. The output phase began with a three-day training. The aim of the training was to provide the fellows with the opportunity to enhance a wide array of skills. It also gave us a chance to meet our group members and focus on a given topic.

Participants were divided into seven smaller groups, each focusing on a unique human rights issue: Jewish Rights/Issues, Jan Karski, Irena Sendler, Roma Rights/Issues, Asylum Seeker/Migrant Rights, Rights of People with Disabilities and Rights of LGBTQ Persons.

Our group consisted of three people, Kasia Klimowicz, Ankur Doshi and Nara Narimanova, and our task was to create a workshop on Roma issues for Polish youth from ages 16-19. It was rather difficult to come up with specific ideas of the workshop, but the three of us knew what we wanted to do – we wanted to create a tool to educate the students on Roma history, culture, and connected Human Rights issues in Poland, to raise awareness about diversity among the Roma ethnic group, and to help students in identifying and intervening on discriminatory behaviors.

As we started our research, we quickly found out that the Roma population faces discrimination and racism in many aspects of society, and many of them do not have access to proper healthcare, education, or political representation. We also discovered that many people in Polish society hold biases against the Roma community. In our workshop, we knew that we would have to bring these issues up to the Polish pupils. Although in the beginning we wanted to make a video documenting Roma people in Poland, we realized that it was best for us to focus on creating a simple, influential, and effective workshop that would allow the Polish pupils to reconsider the biases they may hold against the Roma.

We learned that there are many organizations in Poland that help bring awareness to Roma issues. We specifically met one of the representatives from the Karta Centre, Agnieszka Kudełka, who helped us obtain more information and resources. She was a great help!

Halfway through the output phase, we presented our project to the HIA Poland team. The meeting was held together with other group, so that we could compare our work and learn from each other’s progress. More or less our team received good recommendations, but we still needed to polish our workshop, including preparing the presentation, writing case studies, creating questions for the brainstorm game, drafting an essay (4 pages long) on the Human Rights issues affecting the Roma community, and preparing a blog entry together with photographs taken during the process within the given deadline.

With lots of work still left, we decided to work individually by dividing the duties and responsibilities. Thus, everything was prepared within the deadline. During the Output Phase, we learned a lot about Roma issues, creating a workshop, and meeting deadlines. Overall, we also had a lot of fun working together as well!


More information to follow-up on this topic in our another blog post:
Overcoming Barriers...of Stereotypes