In the spirit of non-discrimination and equal opportunity and treatment, „A Chance for the Future” NGO, in partnership with “Concordia Oslo” NGO, started in the early 2015 the „Theatre Dialog Box” project based on the idea of the non-formal education for 28 high school students from Bucharest and Ilfov.

The project, supported by a grant from Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and the Romanian Government, under the program PA17 / RO13 “Promoting diversity in arts and culture under the European cultural heritage” started from the harsh reality of the increasing ethnic discrimination in Romania and the also from the desire to create cultural spaces for young people.

In 2013, 58% of Romanians would not accept as a relative a Roma, 36% would not accept a person of another religion to visit Romania, 30% have never heard of the Holocaust, 21% believe that national minorities constitute a threat to Romania.

The 28 students that already attended minorities history classes and pottery classes and are now writing forum-theatre play under the guidance of the Master Cristian Mihăilescu . After that they will be able to sustain a country tour in eight cities in Romania, including Bucharest. Subsequently, the 14 most involved students will have two representatives in Oslo, Norway.

The project implementation period is January 15th, 2015 – January 15th, 2016.

Although we have only 3 months of implementation, we could already draw some conclusions that we are worry about:

1) High school students do not know the main concepts of democracy and they do not know their rights and obligations, they do not understand the role of the state, the civil society, and some of them have never been in an auditorium. However, we are sure that nowadays students  have great potential, imagination, creativity and innovation capacity.

2) Non-formal education does not exist in schools and children with talent and artistic abilities never get to discover their capacity. Some of the causes are the limited resources. Romania loses artists and values ​​for this reason.

3) We consider necessary introducing a school class in order to instill children those ​​essential values that makes the rules in the strengthen democracies and increase civic activism. Students must learn about human rights and freedoms, discrimination, minorities’ history, liberating thought and trends history and also about fundamental democratic concepts etc.

4) In the other hand, we discovered that few schools that encourage cultural partnerships.

5) The State must ensure access to culture for students through educational institutions, in the sense that the education should focus more on cultural programs and extracurricular activities, in partnership with institutions the can offer cultural acts.

6) We believe schools should be encouraged to attract foreign and national funding. Therefore, we consider that each institution of this kind should have a fundraising expert guidance. This way they can access grants in cultural, educational or artistic fields in the students, teachers, schools and society benefit. It can also be a good opportunity to provide teacher training and encouraging the partnership between public and private entities.

“Theatre dialog box” aims to draw attention on the existing problems and make from his students, cultural trainers and responsible citizens who subsequently will transmit further their gained knowledge.

Our partners: The Comic Opera for Children, The Bucharest School Inspectorate, „Dante Alighieri” Theoretical High School, „Elie Radu” Technological High School.