ESC: Support Roma Inclusion

The Lighthouse of the World, NGO, started its activity in 2004 and is located in Dendropotamos neighborhood, in Western Thessaloniki. Our goal, from the beginning, is the educational and social integration of the young Roma of Dendropotamos. So, we focus on educating children in order to acquire knowledge, develop skills and specialize in things that each one of them is interested in or naturally talented. The long term goal is that they have a better life in the future. The learning cycle is endless so we are always looking for initiatives in order to create opportunities for our children to either develop their existing skills or discover new ones. The activities of the Lighthouse of the World are many and in various different fields, always in accordance with the main goal of the education and self-development of our children. In more detail, our activities are: Supportive Teaching in school subjects (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Contemporary Greek, History, Report, etc.); Teaching foreign languages ​​(English, German, French, etc.); Gardening (children learn to grow vegetables in our garden); Ecology - Environmental Protection & Recycling; Rhetoric Lessons; Astronomy Courses; Hippotherapy; Robotics; Photography lessons; Care & Rescue of Strays; Music Classes. The skills and qualifications that we would like the future volunteers to have are the following: Be communicative; To have ecological awareness; To be animal friendly; To have experiences from collaborations with vulnerable groups in their area; To have a musical education. (Their interests should be similar to the goals and activities of the Lighthouse, as described above.) According to our experience the skills that the future volunteers will develop the people are: Growing and cultivating Empathy; They will get to know the culture of the neighborhood where both Roma and non Roma coexist; They will experience the problems of the area under an ethnographic critical approach and point of view in order to understand the challenges and cultivate a critical way of thinking; They will have the opportunity to learn the language of communication of the Roma (Greek romani). You can visit our webpage through: https://farostoukosmou.com/en/home/ And our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/farostoukosmou/