Tell us a bit about yourself. Who’s Mihai?

My name is Oancea Mihai. I’m from Romania. I’m 27 years old, and I’m currently living in Bucharest, but I’m from Argeș County, from a traditional Roma community. 

What are the projects you are working on?

I have a youth NGO called ROMA T.E.A.M. Association, but I’m also working for another NGO. I work for the Roma Center for Health Policies-Sastipen in Bucharest. I engage with a lot of Roma and non-Roma communities in screening activities of people from rural and urban areas, but mainly focusing on vulnerable situations. Us, as the young people working there, we found out that the young generation there is not active at all within the communities. 

After visiting a lot of different communities, we concluded that we should help. We started a mentorship program in some of the communities that we have been involved in. And after the program was set up, we wanted to carry on. We decided to open a youth NGO, a Roma youth NGO, but not helping just Roma people, because were going for diversity.

We tried to gather resources in order to attract young people. We are trying to grow the organisation into working at the grassroots level with the people. So we have so many plans, but we will take it step by step. 

How are you attracting young people to join you? 

All of us come from rural communities. We are Roma people. We are also non-Roma people. We have been there. We know how it is. We know how to handle difficult situations and how to attract people. Because we have been in their situation. This is the key that we are using in order to work with them. 

What about your personal journey? How did you get to where you are?

One day, someone from an organisation called me, asking me to deliver some packages for the kids at the Christmas market. And I knew the organisation was working with people with fewer opportunities in vulnerable situations. And I’ve been there as well. 

I knew how the people were feeling. I asked the project coordinator if I could help out with something or if I could do something for the children.

I wanted to be a volunteer. I started to volunteer with the children. I was doing their homework with them. I was providing them with food to eat and then cleaning after them. And they started to call me a teacher. It was a big step for me, wow, they are calling me a teacher. 

It was a very nice opportunity to try to get more involved in other people’s lives, especially with the young people, Roma and non-Roma people. 

When I moved to Bucharest for university I knew someone who, at the time, was working for the first Roma organisation from Bucharest. I became a volunteer there and I participated in their projects. I met a lot of people. 

Then I visited a youth NGO and I saw something different from what I had done before. I wanted to get more involved. I got involved with the Romanian Roma Youth Civic Union, a nationally known organisation, where I continued to work for young people, especially for Roma youth. For a few years, I organised activities such as youth forum rights and human rights activities. 

I enrolled in the postgraduate program here in Bucharest, and I started to work for the Roma Centre for Health Policies-Sastipen. Here we started creating new opportunities and meeting new people. That is how I ended up opening a youth NGO for Roma people and continuing working for the old NGO in the health sector. 

What is your vision?

When we started the NGO, we felt that we needed to do a different kind of work, that was more grassroots level. We are working at the grassroots level and trying to empower young people, as well as working with parents from rural communities.

“What we aim to do is try to change the mentality of the people, to show them new opportunities, to empower them to shape their own future, knowing they can decide what to do with their future and that they have a right to it. “

We go to the rural communities, we work with the children and as they grow up, they know that they will have opportunities. Their teachers and parents will also be involved in their personal development, this is the key.

What is your strategy? 

We would like to have a community centre, not just one, but one for each area that we work in. That is a big plan for the future.

For the moment, we want to focus on small communities and grow step by step. We are involving the local authorities in the young people’s education and we try to work with the teachers because they are key in supporting students with their studies and letting them know that it is important to believe in themselves. We also want to start focusing more on mental health. We are part of the French Embassy and Youth French Council from Romania where we applied for a project focusing on mental health.

We chose a high school from Bucharest, to have a pilot project. It is very important to start talking about mental health in these communities, as Roma people experience a lot of discrimination and this is one part of the puzzle to combat it. Focusing on mental health is very important in order for the students to be motivated to go to school, to try to and see other things in their life.

If you could send a message to the young people out there, what would it be?

I would have wanted to know about the opportunities that were out there back in my childhood. I didn’t know that I had the opportunity to get educated about my financial situation, personal development and other things. The thing is that we need to find a reason to grow. We need to find a reason to go to school and we need to find a reason to see life with new eyes. 

And we need to search for that, not just stay in one place waiting for it. Try to look for the things that you need in your life. Try to communicate more with your parents, with your teacher, and with yourself, it’s very important. 

Try to work with yourself. Get to know yourself. Try to see what are the challenges in your life in order to challenge them. 

Transform yourself. Go for the opportunities.

The Erasmus Plus project is helping a lot. This is an opportunity to show young people with fewer opportunities other perspectives of life, to meet new people, experience new cultures, and share theirs. 

“When I first went to an Erasmus Plus project, I met Roma people from Greece. I’m Roma from Romania. We spoke the Romani language.  It was like a revelation. Look what happened. Look how nice it is.”

Erasmus Plus projects are also an important opportunity to involve people and try to insert themselves in new contexts. It gives them the opportunity to consider that they can be a teacher, they can be a doctor, they can become a lawyer. 

As a Roma community, we have experienced a lot of discrimination, racism, and slavery, and we have been through the holocaust. I want to be there when people learn about that. I want to see the young generation spreading the information in order to fight against racism and make the community more inclusive so that people can understand us better. We are not different. We have been there in war, we have been there at the dawn of society. We have a culture and we have perspectives.