Service-Learning Approach to Citizenship Education and Professional Learning: The ROMunicare Project

Roma people in Rome area represent a community of 2500 estimated persons that live in several dwelling distributed in the territory of the third, ninth and eleventh Municipal district. In this context several researches showed the difficulties of dialogue between Roma dwellers, civil servant and professionals. It is necessary to point out two issues that can influence the relational mechanism between those groups: the low awareness level regarding the application of human rights citizenship protocols by professionals and civil servants in their daily work-practices; the law awareness level of Roma people about their citizen and civil rights. Those factors contribute to create, in some case a conflict situation, where professionals are perceived by Roma people as “enemies” and in the other hand Roma people as persons without subjectivity, consequently this process produces social inequalities. In this work we present the “Romunicare” project founded by European Commission that had as principal aim building new inclusion model for people of “Roma community” living in Rome area, trough action research method. The project was designed by Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies (IRPPS/CNR), a public partner (Roma Capitale), a private sector partner (ARES 2.0) and NGO organisation (Popica) This model had as principal goal to produce a convergence between Roma users, civil servants of Rome Municipality in charge of the delivery of low threshold services and NGO operators from CESV (Centro Servizi per il Volontariato). The direct groups targeted by the project are: • 60 Civil servants working in the Dipartimento Politiche Sociali Sussidiarieta e Salute of Roma Capitale • 60 Municipial Districts operators of low threshold services • 20 NGO operator from CESV (Centro Servizi per il Volontariato) • Roma individuals 50 of which will be directly involved in the project (although the project indirectly will target 1000 Roma individuals of recent arrival who are camped in informal dwelling). In order to success in this project it was important consider Roma Camps not only a place of bare life () but a context of Rome people can be subject and citizen (Maestri, 2016). This action-research project worked to promote Roma people empowerment and supporting their subjectivity process. Moreover, one of the Romunicare purpose was to design an inclusion policy model, and good practices to help civil servants and professionals. To reach the project objectives the activities will be focused on the learning activities both in frontal and mutual learning mode.