VIDEO: 80 Romani recipients of the ROMEA scholarship meet at the Old Town Hall in Prague

The event will be moderated this year by Vojtěch Lavička and ROMEA TV will broadcast it live online. Auspices for this ceremony were provided by Prague City Councillor Hana Třeštíková.

Guests will include representatives of the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Prague; representatives of the British Council; the co-owner of Albatros Media, Silke Horáková; and a video message from Yechiel Bar-Chaim, an independent consultant to Bader Philanthropies in the USA. The cultural program will feature singer Natálie Kuchárová, a student at the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory in Prague and her sister, Klaudie Kuchárová, who matriculated to that same school this year.

“ROMEA has run the scholarship program since 2016, this year we are supporting 50 high school students, six college students and 25 university students from all over the Czech Republic,” Štefan Balog, manager of the scholarship program, told news server Romea.cz. The program involves supporting Romani students with good academic records who would not be able to afford to attend secondary school due to their families’ bad financial situations or whose further study is at risk because of their social exclusion.

“We are doing our best to aid Romani students on their path to an education. From a long-term perspective, that means empowering Romani people as individuals and as representatives of their communities economically, politically and socially. These future professionals of Romani origin will therefore be able to better join the decision-making processes essential to changing inequalities in society and its structures,” Balog said.

Recipients of the scholarship are selected on the basis of assessments from a three-member commission of experts who score the students’ applications. “Those contain information about the student’s academic track record so far, a description of their living situation and the reasons the student is applying for the scholarship, their motivation for studying, and also information about their extracurricular activities or any successes they have achieved above and beyond their regular studies,” Balog said.