About the Manush Foundation

Manush subscribes to the proverb: „If you give a man fish you feed him once, but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for life”. (Chinese proverbs)

Manush, the Roma word for human being, is an organization dedicated to the education and empowerment of the Roma, Hungary’s largest minority…
…This is done through programs which facilitate (intercultural) education and re-integration into the information society and laborforce. Manush does not seek to provide charity, but to give the skills that will ease their path in the non-Roma environment, while initiating communication between the Roma and non-Roma communities.
We also strongly believe in what Martin Luther King once: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere”.  Indeed, the situation of Roma in Europe is in many ways similar to the situation of the African-Americans before the Civil Rights movement.
Manush was established and registered on March 23 2003. It is a private organisation (NGO), founded in November 2002 by Ferenc BLASKOVITS, a professional communications and marketing expert and head of the communications agency, Press&Inform, Budapest. The director of the foundation is Gina Böni, a Hungarian-speaking Swiss journalist, based in Hungary. In 2001 the Soros Foundation Hungary awarded her a grant to carry out field studies into the creation of information and communications centers in Northern. For six months she visited and and contacted socially disadvantaged Roma and non-Roma families and NGO’s. The above programme is a result of this study which led to the establishment of the foundation.

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