How to eat an elephant- Lessons on a step-by-step process from Budapest

We began Roma-NeT with the question "how do you eat an elephant?" Developing methods to combat Roma exclusion seemed an impossible task but during the URBACT Roma-NeT project we learned about the tools we needed to eat an elephant by cutting the problem down into smaller, manageable chunks.

We did this through creating our Local Support Groups (LSG) and we used our Local Action Plans (LAP) as the recipe for change. During the pilot delivery network we got to see if the small chunks that we had divided our work into, could work as interventions to create better Roma inclusion.

The Pilot Delivery gave us an opportunity to discover that sometimes we could not achieve all of our goals as we wished, we had to search for parallel ways, we needed to find the right tools and human resources to step forward. Often it was the difficult bureaucracy that stopped us from doing what was needed on the ground.

During Roma-NeT, Budapest cooperated with a lot of organizations with a wide-range of approaches to strengthen social inclusion. We worked bilaterally and in networks. With our local partners we searched for the key factors of the development in communities and found that one of the most important elements was to find key people to work with. We found that in most successful cases there are one or two key people involved. These individuals are usually passionate, enthusiastic, prepared stakeholders who know the issues around Roma inclusion well.

Finding these people is essential to the success of creating active social inclusion. They usually work at community level and are usually an integrated part of the community. Because of this they know the most important characteristics and problems of a micro-community. And they try hard to change or effect positively the community they are involved in.

These committed, passionate people are the VIPs of all our social processes. They are the drivers of change from several viewpoints: • they are accepted by the community • they are accepted or more or less accepted by the authorities • they are accepted by other communities and key people too • they have the skills to change to better working methods, to fine-tune applied tools • they have the deepest influence on social processes.

It is important for municipalities not only to identify these key individuals, but also to work with them and to invest in them as they are the ones who can make things happen. Through recognizing them and paying close attention to what they are doing and how they are doing it, municipalities can work with them to affect change. Developing grassroots NGOs will increase the number of confident, cooperative and prepared experts in the fields who are able to work with municipalities to affect change.

At city level municipalities have the opportunity to provide information flow, to set up and maintain networks, to produce, to collect, to structure and to disseminate knowledge on specific topics about sustainable society and the environment with a focus on social regeneration and active social inclusion. Working with NGOs in the long-term helps us all to facilitate a step-by-step approach.

A key component of this is for municipalities to listen to the communities they are trying to service – Roma in this case. Municipalities should continuously engage with and involve (all possible) stakeholders and assist them all to become key agents for change, to understand the importance of being part of and even ‘the engine’ of our networks. We need to help our stakeholders to understand the importance of the co-planning processes, the importance of mutual learning exchange and of having the opportunity to find out what works best through pilot schemes.