Reference Type: Aggregated Database
Author: CJD Eutin
Year: 2005
Title: "Community Force" - Tapping into the potential of social networks of communities in order to eradicate poverty and exclusion
Date Accessed: 09.09.2014
Type of Work: Project
Short Title: "Community Force" - Tapping into the potential of social networks of communities in order to eradicate poverty and exclusion
Keywords: Roma Minority, Social Inclusion
Abstract: "Community Force" is the name given to a project that focuses, by means of a combination of research methods and an international exchange between partner organizations (see below), on the productive potential of excluded groups in majority societies, in order to use these socio-politically to avoid poverty overcome exclusion.
Many migrant and ethnic minority communities have developed social strategies and forms of self organization for mutual support and protection of interests across local, regional and even national borders. These informal structures and organizational units differ according to the socio-political structure of the majority society, the type and form of the exclusion exercised by this majority society and the interests of the excluded community. It is the goal of the project to determine the particular strengths and qualities of the respective social networks of selected communities in the individual partner countries with regard to preventing poverty and overcoming exclusion, and for all relevant stakeholders to learn from each other in transnational exchange.
Notes: In the first year of the project we analyzed the structures and functions of the networks of certain ethnic minority or migrant groups in the respective partner countries by means of qualitative investigations (in the case of Hungary and Romania the Roma, in Germany the Turkish, and in Italy the Moroccan community). The findings of this first year of the project are published on the project homepage (www.community-force.eu).
In the second year of the project, debate is continuing through transnational exchange about socio-political aspects of the study and their consequences for each of the respective national policies and European social policy. The debate should be held against the background of an international panel of experts from various areas of society with the aim of sounding out possibilities for theory-to-practice transfer.
The first international conference took place in Cluj, Romania in December 2006 entitled "The Institutionalized Political Influence of Minorities: Problems, Practices und Prospects". Representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations described the extent to which the Roma ethnic minority had been integrated in their area of Romania. In March 2007 the second international conference entitled "Moving the Network. Ethnic Communities, Discrimination and the Labour Market" took place in Naples. At this conference politicians and practitioners debated the complex topic of the structures of the economic self organization of migrants.
URL: http://www.cjd-eutin.eu/projekte_communityforce.0.html?&L=2
Name of Database: "Community Force" - Tapping into the potential of social networks of communities in order to eradicate poverty and exclusion
Database Provider: CJD Hamburg + Eutin, CCRIT
Language: Romania