• ETP Slovakia – Center for Sustainable Development is a social laboratory that has been developing and field-testing innovative, pattern-breaking models of social importance in order to alleviate extreme poverty and social exclusion within segregated Roma ghettos in Slovakia since 2001.

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• ETP Slovakia (ETP) has developed novel approaches focused on the social inclusion of people suffering long-term exclusion. Many of ETP’s initiatives have already gained support among legislators and become integral parts of the revised National Strategy of the Slovak Republic for Roma Integration up to 2020, including:

  • field social work,

  • community centers in marginalized Roma communities,

  • financial literacy programs combined with micro-savings and micro-credits,

  • home improvements and self-help house construction programs,

  • youth mentorship programs, and

  • sensitization models and training programs for those in public administration.

 

• ETP focuses on five main areas: family stability & housing, health & well-being, education, financial literacy and employment & career, embracing the principle “from-cradle-to-career”.

 

• Clients of ETP are people who grew up in segregated Roma ghettos. This is why ETP Slovakia has been focusing its sights on interrupting the cycle of intergenerational poverty since 2001. Thanks to ETP’s interconnected measures, developed as a comprehensive approach, clients have moved from being passive recipients of social benefits to becoming motivated individuals seeking a variety of opportunities to use their own efforts to improve the situation of their families and their communities in general.  

 

• Currently, ETP works with underprivileged inhabitants in the following ghettos: Košice-Luník IX, Rankovce, Stará Ľubovňa-Podsadek and Veľká Ida through providing of comprehensive social, health, housing, educational, financial and employment services in a safe and supportive network of community centers.

 

• ETP’s professionals, educators, pedagogues and social workers train children, youth and adults in basic life skills and assist them to live up to their full potential. Utilization of the Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment increases ETP clients’ ability to cope with new conditions and situations confronting them in life, schools and in work-places, and develop their full potential. In addition to educational, training, social, housing programs ETP provides a set of supportive measures, including mentorship for a personal development, work-integration program, which support ETP’s clients in their transition from school or unemployment to a rewarding and productive career.