Director of Czech Agency for Social Inclusion says criticism from Romani civil society is "untrue", claims to actively involve Roma and work for their benefit

The criticism also concerned the allegedly insufficient transparency and lack of involvement of the Romani community in the projects realized through the Agency. News server Romea.cz is publishing the response from Šimáček in full below.

RESPONSE FROM THE AGENCY FOR SOCIAL INCLUSION

The letter by Marian Dancso and Michal Miko may give readers the impression that the Agency does not work to benefit socially excluded Romani people, or that it avoids collaborating with Romani people, or that it does not actively involve Roma in cooperating in municipalities. It might give the impression that the Agency does not want to demonstrate proof of its work in the municipalities, or that it is defending itself against making such a demonstration. None of that is true. The opposite is true.  

At the end of June, the Agency was called upon by several members of its Monitoring Committee to present the impact of its work on Romani people. We gave an extensive presentation to committee members on 8 August. We presented everything we could fit into a two-hour meeting, including the discussion. We declared that we are prepared to continue with similar meetings. I consider that to be essentially important. 

For that reason I am taken aback by the fact that instead of a constructive continuation of the discussion, two members of the Council decided to write a letter to the Prime Minister in which they criticize the allegedly inadequate involvement of Romani people in collaborations with the Agency.

The impression the letter makes is that these members may have not even attended the committee meeting, or that they did not want to hear the information provided there.  

I am also surprised because the Agency’s Monitoring Committee has met just sporadically for several years now and has not been asking about the Agency’s results.   

The Agency was created in 2008 to aid with addressing Romani social exclusion. From the beginning it has been reproached with not being able to document the results of its work, among other things, on involving Romani people in particular. Ever since returning to the post of director of the Agency I have been aware of this justified requirement. For that very reason we have made several important changes over the last 18 months.  

In the municipalities where the Agency works we have begun systematically tracking the fulfillment of their local Plans for Social Inclusion. A new tool called MONITORING is aiding us with following the results of this work, both for measures to support housing, employment, education and helping the inhabitants of excluded localities relieve themselves of debt, and in terms of the numbers of people who receive assistance through this route.  

I must emphasize that what we are following through this monitoring are the results of the joint work of municipalities, organizations and other entities involved in the Agency’s local partnerships. It is no easy discipline to measure the Agency’s work, because our task is primarily to collaborate with municipalities and institutions, not to work directly with individuals.  

Despite this, or exactly because of this, we have begun to pay a great deal of attention to community work and the participation of citizens in collaborating with municipalities. We are augmenting the Agency’s methodology to include a tool for the active participation of Romani people both in assessing situations and in resolving them. The Agency’s aim is, on the one hand, to create conditions in the municipalities for addressing social exclusion because the municipalities and the state are the responsible parties for that, and therefore the Agency is as well, and on the other hand, it is the aim of the Agency to beef up the conditions for the active participation of citizens in public life.  

Nothing could be more fatuous than to transform the Romani residents of excluded localities into the passive targets of somebody else’s interests. By doing so we would not find a solution to their social exclusion, but we would be pushing impoverished Romani people into an even greater trap.  

Last year the Agency began a project targeting methodological support for small organizations, often pro-Romani and Romani ones, to perform community work. During a relatively short amount of time we managed to prepare 20 projects targeting community work and participation in excluded localities worth more than CZK 156 million [EUR 6.2 million] from Operation Programme Employment Plus, call number 18. We are continuing this with the current call, number 65. Methodological meetings are underway where community leaders, both men and women, gather, and most of them are Romani. The community work implementers, the leaders and the Agency staff are greatly enriching each other by sharing their experiences and aiding with the development of the community work.  

In collaboration with the VIA Foundation, we are contributing to a unique project supporting Romani women leaders that brought support to 16 projects during 2021 and 2022 initiated directly by the Romani residents of socially excluded localities. Almost 1,000 people participated in the educational events held as part of that project.   

In the municipalities where the Agency is working we are collaborating with excellent figures from the Romani community. For that reason we invited them to a day-long forum in June which we called “Is Your Voice Being Heard?” Dozens of Romani people who are active in such localities were involved in the work of six thematic workshops and contributed their ideas for resolving complex subjects such as housing inaccessibility, long-term unemployment and indebtedness, the educational segregation of Romani children, and other areas. We carefully compiled the outputs of those workshops for the ministries responsible. We will work with them during negotiations on these issues. We are preparing a follow-up meeting to the workshops right now. 

It is absolutely appropriate that the Agency be pressured to prove the results of its work. After all, it is addressing one of the biggest social problems in the present-day Czech Republic. The dissatisfactory position of Romani people in Czech society as a long-term phenomenon is part of the problem. Romani people still face systemic discrimination in employment, in housing (as the vassals of the traffickers in poverty) and in education.  

For that reason, we also started three big systemic projects this year. One takes direct aim at eliminating institutional discrimination. In another, we have pledged to prepare comprehensive solutions (both social ones and in terms of urban planning) for several socially excluded localities which are quite burdened by these problems. In the future, we would also like to provide those solutions to other municipalities where there are residential segregation zones including residential hotels, for example. In the third project, we started collaborating with six towns on systematically eliminating segregation in the education of socially disadvantaged children, Romani ones in particular.

The Agency’s role is to interconnect public policies and aid them with becoming sustainable in the long run and systematic in nature, based on the municipal departments’ and municipalities’ good practices with actively involving citizens. During this work, we must pay particular attention to involving Roma. We are doing our best to achieve this and we are not abandoning that role, the opposite is the case. We are declaring that we need to correctly, openly discuss this with the members of the Government Council and the Monitoring Committee.