Roma Society Novi Bečej

Roma Society is a feminist group, founded in 1999 in Novi Bečej. Our main focus is offering support to Roma and women of other national minorities on Banat territory.

Our main activities include psychosocial help to women via workshops and SOS telephone line communication in languages of national minorities: Roma, Hungarian and Romanian. We offer legal advice to victims of abuse through our legal department. We represent them in the court – in cases of family abuse, institutional discrimination and racist attacks.

We empower smaller women’s groups and develop Roma women activism in Vojvodina.

We started Roma Women’s Network of Banat. Organization Romnjako Ilo from Zrenjanin and Roma Society Danica from Pančevo are also part of this network.

Together with other Roma Women’s Network members, we work towards improvement of institutional mechanisms that work on solutions for Roma women’s problems. This is accomplished through local action plan initiation in Banat and gender sensitivity of entire Decade of Roma Inclusion.

We carried through 47 projects in 45 Roma neighborhoods in Bečej, Zrenjanin, Kikiknda, Novi Kneževac, Stari Bečej, Miloševac, Kumane and Boćar. Over 6000 adults and 2000 children passed through our programs.

We promoted rights of Roma women to a life without violence and discrimination, on the streets of Novi Bečej, during opening ceremony of Month of Roma Women Activism. During that time, we talked to citizens and we distributed informational pamphlets.

On March 9th, we had an action Breakfast with a purpose and have invited women in charge of the local self government, Social Work Center, Police Department, National Employment Service, local hospital and women from Roma neighborhoods in Novi Bečej. We had a chance to talk about an actual process of development of an action plan for improvement of Roma women’s status in our county, as well as steps of further cooperation of everyone that attended.