The MigRom project in partnership with Manchester City Council is working toward setting up the ‘Roma Consultation Forum for Manchester’.
The MigRom project (‘The immigration of Romanian Roma to western Europe: Causes, effects and future engagement strategies’) was launched in the spring of 2013 for a four-year period with funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework research programme.
The project is a consortium that includes academic partners in the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Romania, as well as Manchester City Council and the European Roma and Traveller Forum, an umbrella organisation of Roma NGOs that is affiliated with the Council of Europe. The project investigates the participation of Roma migrants in the fields of housing, access to services, employment, and education, as well as local authority policies and engagement strategies with Roma migrants and public attitudes to Roma.
The consortium also seeks to set new standards of collaboration between researchers, local government, and Roma representation. The individual academic partner projects are all led by senior academics with a track record of research in Romani studies; they work with specialist junior researchers and Roma research assistants.
The partnership with Manchester City Council revolves around the provision of outreach services to the local Roma community, especially those from Romania. To this end, the project employs three outreach workers – two of whom are Roma, one is an EAL teacher of Romanian background – who work closely with the City Council’s Regeneration Team.
The outreach workers run weekly drop-in sessions and offer a range of support and advice services. They also feed back observations to the research project and the City Council. In this way, practice is guided by evidence and the research is in turn directly informed by the practical outreach work. The project also tries to monitor and assess local authority interventions on Roma and aims to provide advice for the drafting of evidence-based policy.
For further information and to read the full report, visit: http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/migrom/docs/Consultation%20Forum.pdf