ERIACNET4EU Capacity-Building Trainings | September 2026
In the frame of the ERIACNET4EU project, financed by the European Commission, the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) is excited to announce a new series of capacity-building trainings taking place during September 2026. These workshops and seminars are designed to provide valuable skills, encourage collaboration, and support the preservation and promotion of Roma culture. This month we are launching two of five planned sessions — registration for the remaining trainings will open soon.
Storytelling & Performance: Finding, Shaping and Sharing Your Story
Date: September 3, 2026
Time: 03:00 – 04:30 PM CET
Registration: https://forms.gle/3QZMcBqtPiosXhvu6
Objective: In this practical and interactive workshop, playwright and storyteller Dan Allum will explore how lived experience can be transformed into compelling narrative and performance. Participants will explore how to:
- Find powerful stories within personal experience, memory and identity.
- Shape those experiences using simple techniques drawn from playwriting and storytelling.
- Share their stories without feeling they have to speak for an entire community.
Through individual reflection, practical exercises and small-group discussion, participants will begin developing stories rooted in their own experiences and voices. These sessions aim to strengthen Roma cultural agency and provide participants with concrete skills and knowledge. We look forward to your participation in these workshops.
For the workshop: Please bring an object that has personal meaning for you and connects you to a person, place, period or moment in your life.
Trainer: Dan Allum
Dan Allum is an award-winning playwright, writer and workshop facilitator of Romani heritage. He founded the Romany Theatre Company and his work has been produced, presented and broadcast by organisations including the BBC, National Theatre, Royal Court, Royal Opera House and Arcola Theatre. He is currently writing A Road of My Own, a memoir exploring identity, belonging and growing up within a Romani family, alongside A Road of Your Own, a programme of workshops and live performance encouraging people to explore and tell their own life stories.
Website: www.danallum.co.uk
LinkedIn: Dan Allum
The Romani Language: History, Dialects, Practice
Date: September 4, 2026
Time: 03:00 – 04:30 PM CET
Registration: https://forms.gle/m5BuXhrAcUrJMXDH7
Objective: This training introduces participants to the Romani language — its history, structure and written tradition. It combines a theoretical part with listening to and watching authentic materials and a hands-on session, allowing participants not only to learn about the language but also to hear its variation and take their first independent steps in using it. The training covers:
- Historical background — the Indo-Aryan origins of Romani, migration from India, contact with Persian, Armenian, Greek and Balkan languages, and the formation of dialect groups across Europe.
- Dialects today — the main dialect groups (Vlax, Balkan, Northern and Central), their distribution and mutual intelligibility, and questions of codification and standardisation, using the codification process in Ukraine as a case study.
- Dialect samples (audio and video) — recordings of speakers of different dialects, animated films dubbed in various dialects, and Radio Romano fairy tales, presenting the language as a living environment used today, including with children.
- Master class — basic vocabulary, greetings and simple constructions, reading and pronunciation, and practical exercises.
Trainer: Janush Panchenko
Janush Panchenko is a specialist in Romani history, culture and language and a research associate at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. A native speaker of the Vlaxicko dialect, he combines academic research with practical work on language preservation: he studies the Romani dialects of Ukraine, is preparing a dictionary of the Vlaxicko dialect for publication, and has developed a Cyrillic-based codification of that dialect. He heads the subgroup on the writing system within the working group on the codification of the Romani language at the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience.
He is the author of bilingual educational materials in Romani, recommended by UNICEF and the Ukrainian Institute of Education Development for use in formal school education in Ukraine, and the translator of a children’s Bible into Romani. He writes fairy tales in Romani, works as a voice actor for animated films, audiobooks and radio plays, and runs a blog on the Romani language.
As a poet and translator he works in the Vlaxicko dialect, translating world and Ukrainian poetry into it. He won first place at the Bronisława Wajs (Papusza) International Competition of Romani Poetry and Literary Translation in 2021, and in 2023 in Montreal he received the Ronald Lee Award for his contribution to the preservation and development of the Romani language.
He is the founder of the Romani organisation Romano Than and co-head of the Ukrainian Centre for Romani Studies and of the Ukrainian Roma Advocacy Alliance (AURA).
Instagram: @janush_panchenko
Facebook: facebook.com/janpanchenko
Fundraising & International Project Management: From Idea to Fundable Project
Date: September 25, 2026
Time: 03:00 – 04:30 PM CET
Registration: https://forms.gle/qbgmkFi5riE84gxDA
Objective: This practical session guides participants from a good project idea to a strong, fundable EU proposal, using the Logical Framework as the backbone. Working through concrete examples, participants will explore how to:
- Build a project’s intervention logic — moving from problem and needs, through objectives and activities, to outputs, results and long-term impact.
- Apply the “so what?” test to turn vague ambitions such as “raise awareness” or “empower Roma artists” into clear, measurable change.
- Compare the logic of CERV and Erasmus+, and see how the same project idea can be framed differently depending on the funding programme.
- Look at a proposal through the eyes of an evaluator — including budget, partnership design and risk management — and understand what actually makes it convincing.
Trainer: Atanas Stoyanov
Atanas Stoyanov is a Bulgarian Roma policy expert and advocate with extensive experience in civic participation and NGO capacity-building across Europe. He has worked with organisations including Amalipe, the Arete Youth Foundation, and Phiren Amenca. He holds an MA in Public Policy from the Central European University. He currently works as a Policy Officer at the European Commission’s DG JUST, bringing hands-on experience in project development and funding advocacy for Roma-led initiatives.
Intercultural Collaboration & Inclusive Communication
Date: September 28, 2026
Time: 03:00 – 04:30 PM CET
Registration: https://forms.gle/ejKHNjNPEgVsuDe89
Objective: This interactive online workshop, jointly facilitated by Dr. Maria Bogdan and Kitti Baracsi, combines a conceptual and critical approach to intercultural collaboration and inclusive communication with creative, participatory methods. Participants will:
• Explore the distinctions and relationships between collaboration and communication, and between the intercultural and the inclusive, drawing on critical, postcolonial and feminist approaches to representation, voice, power and knowledge production.
• Reflect on how cultural, social, gendered, professional and institutional positions shape collaboration and communication, both between Roma and non-Roma actors and institutions, and within Roma communities.
• Take part in creative exercises — inspired by counter-cartography, performance, storytelling and collage — to collectively analyse and rethink communication challenges and power dynamics, with particular attention to migration, social mobility and multilingualism.
• Connect these conceptual and creative perspectives to their own professional experience in a closing shared discussion.
Trainers: Dr. Maria Bogdan and Kitti Baracsi
Dr. Maria Bogdan is a media and cultural theorist whose research examines contemporary and historical injustices and racism through representation (media, film and archival), cultural memory and cultural trauma, with recent work foregrounding oral history and the Roma Holocaust. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Film, Media and Culture Theory Doctoral Program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (2018), and her academic career includes a Fortunoff research fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023–2025) and the first Romani Rose fellowship at the Antigypsyism Research Center, Heidelberg University (2019–2020). A Fulbright alumna, she conducted part of her doctoral research at Columbia University. She is a founding member and managing editor of Critical Romani Studies, and served as the first Chair of ERIAC’s Barvalipe Academy for six years (2019–2024). In 2026, she serves as ERIAC’s Section Coordinator for the Research and Publication Section.
Kitti Baracsi works at the intersection of art, critical pedagogy and urban research, curating and facilitating creative learning spaces and community art initiatives focused on urban inequalities, collective practices and rethinking knowledge production. She has a background in Communication Science, Aesthetics and Pedagogy. Born in Hungary and based in Lisbon, she collaborates with movements, schools, associations, cultural institutions and universities across Europe and occasionally in Latin America. She is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at LSE Inequalities, an Associated Researcher at the Center for Research in Anthropology at ISCTE-IUL, a Regional Fellow for Europe at Global Artivism, and co-founder and member of several collectives in Lisbon and internationally.
Heritage, Archiving & Museum Development: Collecting In and Out of the Context of Museums
Date: September 29, 2026
Time: 03:00 – 04:30 PM CET
Registration: https://forms.gle/nQa3aDYF5ZThnhpDA
Objective: This workshop is ERIAC’s first tentative answer to members’ expressed interest in collecting and documenting Romani heritage. It looks at the resources available to organisations wishing to start their own collections, shares good practices between those already doing so, and takes a wider look at collecting as a practice. It is open to anyone with an interest in collecting or documenting Romani heritage, with or without an institutional background. Participants will take away:
- A better understanding of why we collect and preserve.
- Basic knowledge of collecting principles.
- Best practices from peer organisations.
This session is delivered by the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno.
Trainer: Tereza Richtáriková
Tereza Richtáriková is a curator and historian at the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno. She has a background in contemporary history, education in museums, and facilitation.