Our ambassador Luka Plavčak participated in the international project Peers4inclusion from the second to the tenth of October, 2022. Four countries are a part of the project – Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovenia – with eight different organisations. The project is part of Erasmus+, and it aims to design an online platform, which will serve as an inclusion tool for youth workers and other educational workers.
We asked our ambassador to tell us more about his experience; “In a word, I’d say it was unforgettable, but I promised to share a bit more. The very beginning offered something new for me, as we drove to Romania by car. The city od Arad is very close to the Hungarian border and has an architectural style that would be quite familiar to us, as the city was also under Austro-Hungarian rule. Romanians consider it to be quite a small town, despite having a population of 160,000 people, but it places in the twelfth spot by population size.
The Peers4inclusion project took place in a house that belongs to Arad’s organisation for the blind and visually impaired, who were a excellent hosts. The workshops were scheduled between 10 am and 4 pm, with a lunch break in between. We mostly spent our free time together.”
Many different organisations are part of the project. The VOZIM Institute’s role was to represent the point of view of physically disabled people, in our case wheelchair users. Other present organisations covered the area of the blind and visually impaired, mental disorders, and youth organisations also joined us.
We spent most of our time developing the idea and design of the platform. The team that our member Luka Plavčak was in, was tasked with creating video clips of common misconceptions and stereotypes about disadvantaged people. Our collaboration will continue until the end of April, when you will be able to see the end result – the Peers4inclusion online platform.
“I truly believe that these types of projects are necessary and are the first step on the path to positive change,” concludes Luka Plavčak, an ambassador for the VOZIM Institute and a participant in the project.
