"Fear and ignorance are the root causes of intolerance and its patterns can be imprinted on the human psyche from an early age."

Mr. Federico Mayor Director-General of UNESCO

Since October 2001, the UNA of Bulgaria, partnered with the "Roma Initiative Foundation," has been working on a project titled "Young Volunteers for Human Rights" whose goal is the creation of a sustainable model for ethnic tolerance in schools. The project focuses on intercultural education and on human rights in two neighboring schools. The first school is a secondary school in district 74, Gotse Delchev, and is located in the "Vrabnitsa" region of Sofia. Gotse Delchev is fortunate to have a well functioning parent-teacher organization that is active in the civic education, an element that has proved very useful in the implementation of this project. The second school is primary school St. Kliment Ohridski located in district 70. Most of the students at St. Kliment Ohridski are from Roma origin making this an excellent location for our project.

In the first phase of the project training, free discussions and role games were conducted in both schools. While in Gotse Delchev training aimed at educating the students on human rights and raising awareness of stereotypes and prejudices facing minorities. At St. Kliment Ohridski alternative forms of instruction (i.e. role games) were used to communicate the importance for students to continue their education.

The second phase of the project, currently underway, will be complete in the end of June 2002. Every week the Roma children meet with the students from the secondary school in order to discuss key life issues such as friendship, life-goals, and conflict prevention. Within the project framework, the Roma students will receive computer training. After the computer training the students from both schools will continue meeting. During these future meetings the students will be tackling a very serious goal: they will work together to recognize, register, investigate, and discuss cases of human rights violations.

We hope that the "Young Volunteers for Human Rights" project will open a new window of tolerance and friendship in the schools and will motivate the Roma children to continue their education.

Financial support for the program has been provided by the "Interethnic Fund for Development" initiated by the "Interethnic Initiative for Human Rights Foundation" in Sofia, Bulgaria.

"Interethnic Fund for Development" Program of the "Interethnic Initiative for Human Rights" Foundation financially supported the project.

Young Volunteers for Human Rights Project

In order to prevent human rights violations from happening in the future, the UNA of Bulgaria has recognized the importance for increasing awareness on such matters in the youth of today. This is the major aim of our current project Young Volunteers for Human Rights, which is a program targeting youths in the towns of Shoumen, Veliko Turnovo, and Haskovo. There are two main parts of this initiative: preparation/education and implementation.

Preparation/Education: The students research and utilize literature supplied by the program to understand where the notion of human rights originated and what constitutes a violation and what causes a violation. With such knowledge the students learn how to respond appropriately when they learn of human rights violations in their schools, communities, and other spheres of influence. It is here where the second part of this program will come in to hand.

Implementation: With these educated youths taken from the UN school clubs from the above schools, centers are created in each locality. These centers are the location where the students work at uncovering human rights violations. The students are be given the ability to expose violations and prevent them from happening again. The centers contain computers for registering the violation and they have contacts from which they can provide legal and psychological support for victims. The students work with representatives from the local governments, administrations, and media to try and solve the problems that they find.

Integral to the success of the program is having the student groups be as diverse as possible, containing participants from all minorities existing in the school and community. Also important will be the ability for the groups to raise funds to support their efforts and spread awareness to those not directly involved. The success of this program will be marked by the strong and steady presence of the Young Volunteer Centers in Shoumen, Veliko Turnovo, and Haskovo and hopefully the proliferation of such centers to other towns and communities in Bulgaria.