Asociatia Nevo Parudimos

Nevo Parudimos Association it’s a nonprofit apolitical organization which was founded by a group of teachers, Roma activists and Roma students from Caras-Severin County, in the south-west of Romania in 2008.

Mission

The general mission of Nevo Parudimos is to reduce economic, social and educational disparities in society and mainly to raise the involvement of Roma people, especially youngsters, to the society and combat inequality and discrimination through education and human rights. Besides, we work in lobby and advocacy at national and international level regarding Roma fundings to make the voice of Roma be heard.

Vision

Through education and civil mobilization, Roma and other marginalized groups achieve equal citizenship and participate in all spheres of life in all European societies without facing discrimination as individuals or as community and enjoy the same opportunities as other citizens.

Objectives of the Nevo Parudimos association are:

- To develop activities which promote democracy;

- To promote tolerance, diversity, and equal chances in the society;

- To create community development programs to fight against prejudices towards Roma people;

- To increase the organizational capacity of Roma people;

- To help Roma communities to develop their own competences and abilities to solve problems;

- To develop professional, social, cultural, economic activities and civic commitment.

Our activities are split in more fields like: inclusion of marginalized groups, education, culture, social work, community development, human rights, civil society development, antigypsysim and hate speech, as well as youth work and volunteering.

Besides, Nevo Parudimos is a member of more national and international youth networks:

- Youth Express Network – member since 2011

- YES Forum – member since 2010

- Roma Civic Alliance from Romania

- ternYpe European Roma Youth Network – funding member since 2015

- Phiren Amenca – member since 2014

- European Roma Grassroots Organization Network – associated member since 2015

- International Network Against Cyber Hate – members since 2026

Since its creation, Association Nevo Parudimos has implemented more than 70 international projects in different areas to bring together young people from different backgrounds, youth workers, social workers, trainers, and volunteers to engage in social inclusion, education, and human rights. We are both organizing and being partners for different types of projects such as youth exchanges, training and seminars, strategic partnerships granted by Erasmus+ volunteering projects both as hosting and sending organization by European Solidarity Corps Programme, and different grants such as EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Regional Cooperation, Europe for Citizens Programme, DG Just, Google.org, and Interreg Danube Transnational Programm as well.

Roma Inclusion and Civil Society Development:

Association Nevo Parudimos is a Roma organization which mainly works for Roma and with Roma. So, inclusion of Roma is a very important and sensitive topic for us. We promote Roma inclusion in all level of our work. This is made through the community development activities, lobby and advocacy activities, educational activities and networking and civil society development activities.

In this regard, we strongly believe that the CLLD methodology can bring the change in the Roma community and we worked hard to promote this methodology to be used more especially at the local level where the Roma communities can participate in the decision-making process and can be the voice who makes the change. Using this approach with a constant and long-term intervention we manage to reach the following in national level:

- We developed a strong partnership with the National Federation of Local Action Groups (LAG)

- We manage to include in the local development strategies more than 20 million Euro, funds

which are specially directed for measures and projects which target Roma communities

- We developed a training package for local stakeholders and LAGs to increase the cooperation

between them

- We are involved in urban CLLD and we monitor the process of implementation of CLLD

principles booth in Rural and Urban areas

- We developed a national network of NGO’s – Roma Forum, which cooperate and make lobby

and advocacy at national level to promote use of CLLD and which was one of the actors working to create the newly adopted National Roma Strategy

We work on employment for which we run some research connected with youth guarantee and we implemented already the project Dream Road – Danube Region for better access and empowerment of Roma development, funded by Danube Transnational program contract number DTP3- 383-4.1, project budget 1,686,875.00 EUR. DREAM ROAD tried to build capacities of public bodies to better cope with Roma issues through innovation and dialogue, providing community representatives with the know-how to achieve lasting impact, especially in the employment field. Here we lead the research working package.

For the civil society development since our funding, we supported the creation of new NGO’s and also development of smaller NGOs. The most important project in this field is “New solutions to old problems – exchange of new type of approaches in the field of Roma integration”, funded by Norway grants funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Regional Cooperation, contract no. 2018-1-0697(1.2 mil euro). Through the “New solutions to old problems – exchange of new type of approaches in the field of Roma integration” project, we aim to share successful stories of Roma inclusion projects in the fields of education, employment, participation and combating antigypsyism with funders and state agencies to break the vicious circle of cynicism that ‘nothing can be changed’.

Youth Work:

Nevo Parudimos had implemented more youth activities on different topics such as human rights, social inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights, Roma activism, combating against hate speech etc.

In the past years, we implemented 4 youth in action projects “Roma Youth European Youth”, “Roma

Youth European Youth 2”, “Roma Youth European Youth 3 - Evaluation” and “Roma youth

European Youth 4”, projects in which together with our international partners (18 partners) we

developed a guide “9 steps in working whit Roma youngsters” which offer information and

present different working methods to be used during the work with Roma youngsters in different

projects. We have offered the possibility to take part in more than 50 youth exchanges for 500

youngsters in the last two years majority of them coming from a disadvantage background and

Roma youngsters and 40 youth workers and volunteers took part to international trainings from

our partners. Also, we have a very developed youth department which involves more than 100

youngsters from all the Caras-Severin area. In this field, we assisted different youth groups to

organize and develop activities and we supported the funding of 6 youth NGOs in our area.

Besides, in this regard, we have opened a youth center where we are working with local youngsters

from the city. We are partners in 6 KA2 projects about youth works and disabled youth, digital literacy, and mental health.

Since 2022 we got the Erasmus accreditation in Romania and our youth center become one of the main places for young people from our city to spent their time (more 20 young people are coming there on daily base).

Volunteering:

Since its establishment, Nevo Parudimos has been promoting volunteering in both local and international areas. We strongly believe that voluntary work can be a great tool to promote inclusion and participation and to develop knowle