A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Profile: Maria in Bulgaria

Campaigning for Opportunity Bulgaria:
eRider Maria Metodieva

Maria Metodieva
Email her.
ICQ: 225128883
Email her Yahoo address.
 
By Aspen Brinton

Maria Metodieva finds her job as an eRider much like "being the hero in the comic strip-flying around and helping people with all their different issues and crises."

Maria's work with a network of Bulgarian Roma NGOs - most of whom address the issue of school desegregation -does indeed require her to "fly around" the vast expanse of the Bulgarian countryside. She has a master's degree in public administration, considerable experience working with technology, and a pointed dedication to improving the lives of her fellow Roma people. But all of this gave her little foresight for her first experience as an eRider.

Her inaugural voyage for RIP beset Maria with basic practical difficulties. She remembers how she thought she could conduct assessments of all ten of her target organizations during one single trip, despite the fact they were geographically spread throughout Bulgaria. She set out in her car determined to reach each of the Roma NGOs to survey their needs and goals - what every eRider does before starting to work with an organization. "I took out a map and thought to myself that it didn't look so difficult," she remembers, "But in the end it was a nightmare of ice, snow, mountains, and distances over 300 kilometers. It was not at all what I expected and I was simply not prepared." She managed to reach five NGO - half of her intended target - before she had to return to Sofia.

Since this first experience, Maria has come to know the geography and weather patterns of her home country much better, but she has also learned how to be more effective by taking on eRiding in smaller chunks. This means not only trying not to cover too many groups at once, but also being more focused in her tasks for individual organizations. "People at these NGOs will overload you with work," Maria warns, "But you just have to expect that, deal with it, and not worry about it."

Maria has found a tremendous need for the kind of technical and management support she provides to NGOs - indeed too much demand for her to respond to alone. Despite the pressure, however, she feels as if she has begun to discover effective ways to help Roma organizations. Her preferred methods: engaging in active listening, changing her tactics to suit situations, ensuring that everyone at an organization participates in her trainings, not promising more than she can deliver, and most importantly tapping into the expertise of the RIP team.

"I'm not scared if I don't know something, technical or otherwise," Maria remarks, "because I know I have the other eRiders to support me." She believes RIP's greatest value rests in the international composition of its team and the variety of experience nested in each of them. RIP is a supportive community to which she regularly turns for help and advice. As others have broached the issues surrounding desegregation in their own countries, furthermore, they have begun to turn to her for support and information.

Teammates - Maria from Bulgaria and Gabi
from Czech Republic.

"And we are young," she adds, "and if a group of young people is gathered with a very good reason, the results are likely to be marvelous." RIP eRiders, all well-educated and under the age of 35, represent a bridge between the older generation of Roma and their children - who are growing up in a very different world. The transitions taking place throughout Eastern Europe since the collapse of communism have had a unique impact on Roma, and furthermore different impacts on the younger and older generations. Many older Roma have a degree of nostalgia for communist states, where social services were easier to access and discrimination less blatant. Younger Roma see the worsening conditions, but are much more likely to take advantage of politics as a tool for change, an option never available to their parents. All Roma want to see the conditions of their communities improve, but there is a risk of alienating the older generation through the methods of change.

Technology and youth often go together, as often do youth and the desire for social and political reform. RIP joins all of these elements with the hope of bettering the lives of Roma people. But often the task of helping inspired NGOs requires that eRiders teach people much older than themselves about technology. Each of the eRiders has had to deal with the challenge of inevitable resistance. Part of being an effective eRider, however, is bridging these generational differences.

Maria describes one case in which she trained the leader of an NGO to use e-mail, but found him receptive to only half of the lesson. "He feels proud of himself for receiving e-mails and reading them," she describes, "but won't type to respond, and instead always calls the person who sent the message." She's working to move him toward both receiving and sending messages via e-mail, but she must proceed delicately so that her advice won't be interpreted as disrespect.

Yet if she can get him to change his e-mail habits, she feels she can help make his NGO a stronger campaigning organization. Such a goal is one of RIP's core missions, as technology is an essential tool for NGOs that seek to campaign effectively by disseminating information, networking internationally, reporting on their activities and engaging their constituency. Without the cheap, simple, and effective power of e-mail, for example, NGOs face inhibiting costs of printing, postage, and telephone calls if they want to directly target an audience or communicate with each other.

The lost-cost effectiveness of e-mail has revolutionized the global NGO movement, and eRiders have been surprised to find many Roma NGOs still not using this powerful instrument effectively. While being a relatively simple task, RIP's efforts to set up e-mail and teach staff how to use it can have a tremendous impact on organizations and their campaigns.

In addition, Maria provides organizations with a wide range of other forms of assistance including training, proposal writing, research, website planning, hardware and software installation and upgrading. She indeed flies around with a full range of services to dispense.

School Desegregation: Campaigns, Technology, and Change

The campaign to end school segregation represents the most likely effort to foster radical change within Bulgaria's Roma communities. As in most Central and East European countries, Roma children in Bulgaria have traditionally attended special "Roma schools" of substandard quality. Maria is closely involved in the work of the nation-wide campaign to end this practice, and she is fully committed to making technology an essential component of how Roma NGOs launch, sustain and promote desegregation initiatives. She is working with a network of 10 organizations, all grantees of the Open Society Institute (OSI), who are striving to end segregation and promote opportunities for Roma children.

As experience in the United States has shown, desegregation efforts take decades of hard work, persistence, and political commitment at the highest levels of government. Desegregation also requires mobilizing each and every individual involved on the ground -parents, teachers, students, and school administrators - to believe that overcoming racism and segregation will have more social benefits than costs. Campaigning at the local, regional, national and international levels thus becomes essential to eradicate discrimination and bring about changes to better the lives of the Roma.

The desegregation campaign in Bulgaria is one of the clearest examples of how political initiatives by Roma NGOs can bring about widespread social change on the national level. These NGOs, having put the issue of desegregation on the agenda and launched several successful projects, are now poised to implement even more programs to end segregation in many Bulgarian towns. Though their efforts have received the support of the Bulgarian government and the European Union, often that support is only nominal. As a massive undertaking for NGOs, the campaign for desegregation remains at the embryonic stages.

'DROM:' One Roma NGO Begins the Fight

As part of her eRiding assistance to the network of Roma NGOs, Maria helps perhaps the most famous Roma NGO ever - "Drom," based in Vidin, Bulgaria. In 2002, with the help of OSI funding, Drom gained worldwide attention when it launched a desegregation initiative which aimed to have Roma children bused to regular schools in Vidin and integrated into the standard curriculum. The campaign involved parents, teachers, local schools, and the national government. A June 12, 2002 New York Times article on school desegregation in Bulgaria featured the work of Drom, as did several international television broadcasts and subsequent reports. The Bulgarian president even visited Vidin to praise the results of Drom's efforts.

The groundwork for making this desegregation initiative possible occurred far from Vidin, however. In 1999 the Bulgarian government drafted and adopted the Framework Program for Equal Integration of Roma into Bulgarian Society - commonly known as the "Framework Agreement" - largely due to pressure from the European Union on Bulgaria to clean up its human rights record in preparation for accession negotiations. The agreement had scarcely begun to be implemented by 2002 - which festered into a huge source of frustration for Roma community leaders, whose expectations had been raised after participating in the agreement's drafting process. It became clear that the EU was too far away to push the Bulgarian government toward implementation, and this task was left for the NGOs. The implementation gaps, however, later became the campaigning point to rally for school desegregation.

Donka Panayotova -
Executive Director of DROM, - Vidin, Bulgaria.

Drom led this campaigning initiative, which later developed into the "Vidin Model." Its success lies not only in the effective activities of one NGO, but also in the way that NGOs used the national government, international pressure, and community-based methods to gather resources and put pressure on the local school administration to change it's practices. Drom took up the daunting task of launching such an awareness campaign that engaged and educated parents and local school administrators about the detrimental effects of a segregated education system on children. It also targeted the national government for its lack of implementation of the Framework Agreement. The initiative succeeded in integrating 400 Roma children into regular schools in the first year, and many hundreds more subsequently.

During the entire process Drom served the center hub for the flow of information between the Roma communities, the local government, and the state government - which was eventually persuaded into providing some (although somewhat insufficient) financial assistance to the project. Drom's role highlighted the vital importance of NGOs as conduits for information in campaigns. Information flows, furthermore, depend on technology. RIP seeks to improve NGOs' use of technology, and Maria has been working to train Drom and other NGOs to use information effectively to realize their goals.

Maria was very impressed with her first visit to Drom, remarking afterwards that its director, Donka Panayotova, was "just so convinced in what they are doing." Panayotova also immediately took an interest in RIP and saw how Drom could use Maria's services. Despite its initial success, Drom's work remains far from done. It must not only continue to monitor the local situation in Vidin; it also seeks to spread its model of success and help Roma throughout Bulgaria benefit from what they have learned. Thus its most urgent need is communication between Roma NGOs involved in the desegregation initiatives that are spreading throughout Bulgaria.

In order to assist with this aim, Maria suggested the creation of a joint web site, as well as a CD with training materials and information to distribute to NGOs throughout the country. She spotted the need for further technical training at Drom's office, in order to further advance the computer skills of all the staff. Panayotova was receptive to all these ideas, and Maria continues to visit their offices regularly to implement these plans.

The Power of Information: Gathering, Storing, and Spreading it the eRider way

Drom's work on desegregation demonstrated the power of an NGO campaign when information is collected, used, and disseminated effectively. As an eRider, Maria is now uniquely positioned to help spread that information to other Roma NGOs. This is essential for the desegregation movement to move forward in Bulgaria, as well as an effective way to bring other important issues facing Roma communities into political discussions.

Roma NGOs often become the repositories for information about their communities to which no one else has access. Other sources remain inadequate - government statistics about Roma, for example, are at many times inaccurate, and are likely to hide more problems than they seek to solve. The EU, furthermore, has gathered little information independent of state figures. On their own, individual Roma leaders lack the facilities to compile sufficient data and synthesize it. Thus the onus for correct and independent information often falls on Roma NGOs.

To overcome this challenge, Maria has been helping Drom - as well as other Roma NGOs in the desegregation campaign network - with developing a number of information technology tools that can store and disseminate the information collected over many months of working, campaigning, and lobbying. Putting this information in the hands of more Roma NGOs, coupled with Maria's provision of proper technical tools and the training to use them, serves to facilitate efforts to integrate Roma children into regular schools to receive an appropriate education.

The scarcity of information on best practices and effective tactics renders networking between NGOs across the vast expanse of the Bulgarian countryside essential. Having the support of other organizations when challenges arise in the process of launching campaigns and desegregating schools can mean the difference between success and failure. Technology too makes this possible. Once Maria has the organizations set up on e-mail and using it, they can talk to each other and share experiences without her as an intermediary. This saves her drives through rain and ice, and also saves the NGOs money on phone calls and communication.

Maria serves all ten members of the NGO network working on desegregation in Bulgaria, and her common presence is a further incentive for them to communicate with each other. Maria, has been assisting the Equal Access Foundation, a Sofia-based, Roma-led organization that is working to develop a communication strategy to facilitate the sharing information between NGOs in the network. Eventually they will act as network coordinators, taking over many of Maria's liaison duties.

Maria's work has helped to build and hold together the network, and the way she 'flies around' Bulgaria increases the connectivity of NGOs to each other in the process of teaching them how to effectively use technology to disseminate best practices.

Despite such weight on her shoulders, Maria remains focused on the ability of RIP to have a deep impact on both the national campaign to open opportunities for Roma children in Bulgarian schools and for reinforcing beneficial changes within communities. Her work has demonstrated how NGOs hold unique forms of local knowledge, which must be stored, disseminated and used in the implementation of national-level reforms. Technology can strengthen the value of an NGO's resources, facilitating their goals and increasing their effectiveness. "NGOs will use technology for campaigning and developing their own capacities as organizations," Maria remarks, "and this will make them more sustainable and integrated in the mainstream society and the NGO sector in Bulgaria."