Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

A Roma community in north east Romania.
A village of around 700 people 508 are children aged 0-18 years.
The issues that we are trying to address are fairly complex and so this is a long term project that will empower the people especially the young people of the village.

The issues of the community are as follows.
- No access to clean drinking water in the village. Water is drawn from wells that are partially contaminated as we have had one of them tested so we know this to be true.
- No sanitation or hot and cold running water.
- No work in the village.
- The people are marginalised by their culture and geographically locally by their location.
- No access to general medical and health care services or sexual health / family planing.
- Not enough room at the two roomed local school for the kinder garden children.
- Not youth care or training services for the young people of the village.
- No paid employment within the village.

What is your project and how will it help?

We would like to create a community centre which would be a multi purpose build.
We would construct it out of end of line or old shipping containers. Using volunteers and labour from the UK or beyond and of course the local people of the village.
This project is also helping the environment as it’s using old containers which would otherwise may have to be scrapped so it’s recycling too!
The project will create cohesion and a sense of greater community.
It will provide a pre school for mums and tots.
It will provide a health care clinic a place for treatment assessment and training for locals to learn and carry out simple first aid and medical procedure.
It will provide a youth service for mentoring and training in the village a place where aspiration and inspiration can be realised and new job skills can be taught.
Hopefully allowing them to find jobs and break the cycle of poverty.
Eventually the centre will be run and operated by the local people of the village giving them total ownership to a resource that can last for generations.

How can other people partner with you on your project?

Once we have our containers we would be looking for volunteers from the UK or beyond and the people of the village to help convert the containers into the community centre we hope for.
We would also be hoping to find companies or individuals to help with the logistics of transporting containers from point to point.

Please detail the resources that you need.

We need 2 to 6, 20 foot shipping containers (end of line/used).