”Women Informed, Women Involved!” is a project addressed to women from rural areas, through which we want to involve them in actions of information, awareness and affirmation of their rights, active participation in community life, including in the decision-making process."
From February 2021, in 3 multi-ethnic rural communities in Călărași County (Luica, Soldanu and Curcani), the Center for Education and Human Rights Association, in partnership with Bjerkaker LearningLab from Norway, involves women in community events, reading sessions, information and awareness raising campaigns, addressing issues related to human rights, gender equality, stereotypes, health education.
The Storytelling Club offers 60 moms the chance to discover books with brave, strong, intelligent female characters who can be role models for themselves and their children. Discussions about each book are accompanied by educational games and creative activities that can be replicated at home to spend quality time with their own children. The meetings are coordinated by a facilitator selected from the women in each community and provide an informal setting in which participants get to know each other, share problems, but also their beautiful experiences.
”I read the books with my son, who is in the 8th grade, to make him aware of how much girls and women can suffer and how strong they can be, especially since I want him to respect his wife later in life.”
"We gradually improved our reading skills and understood the importance of reading in our lives and in the lives of our children. This project promotes good attitudes and behaviors that we should have towards our children and peers. We also discovered the joy of reading together and the fact that we need to appreciate ourselves more, as involved women and mothers."
"I have a little girl who is in the second grade. She has devoured all the books she has received so far. She really wanted to read Anne Frank's Diary, but for various reasons I kept postponing buying it. When I came home with the book after the session, the joy was immense. That day she forgot about her phone, her laptop, she was captivated by the girl's courage and didn't put the book down until she had finished it."
The Health Education meetings organized as part of the Information and Awareness Campaign were a good opportunity for 161 women to deepen their knowledge about a healthy lifestyle, women's health and stages of physical development, family planning, screening programs, sexually transmitted diseases.
"I attended every session I was invited to, and from the summer until now I've learned things I didn't know and probably wouldn't have found out if I had researched on the internet or gone to doctors because I would not have initiated such discussions. Here I found many answers and solutions to different situations that can occur in a woman’s life. These meetings also give us the opportunity to talk about certain topics that we might not discuss in another context.”
"These sessions are interactive, with trainers who are open and attentive to participants' views. They were light-hearted discussions, but with lots of new and useful information about health, nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. I really appreciated the involvement, the openness to new things of the women in our community and their willingness to change if supported and helped.”
"A project that gives information and confidence to women to evolve and change something in the family and community."
Workshops in the field of women's rights (gender equality, domestic violence, stereotypes and harmful practices, education, access to justice, women's participation and representation in political and public life, labor market, multiple discrimination, etc.) and community events focusing on multicultural dialogue will take place in the coming period. At the end of the project a debate with local stakeholders and representatives of the beneficiaries is planned to take place in order to present the needs identified by the participants and to discuss future advocacy initiatives on these needs and women's involvement in community life .
