By Gina Hearn | Director of External Relations
The start of the year is always a very busy time for the English College in Prague’s Changing Young Czech Lives team. They are raising money for more scholarships to enable more young Czechs to study at the ECP and our current Scholars have been hard at work organising our 8th annual Václav Havel Scholarship Concert, which took place on 15 March.
The concert is held every year specifically to raise money for a Roma Scholar to join our other Scholarship students at the English College. The setting for this celebration of Roma culture was the 17th century Dominican Monastery in Prague and featured performances by our students and special guest Roma musicians. The whole evening was organised by our students and they were thrilled with the response from the audience, with the evening raising over 60,000 CZK or around 3,500 USD.
But the team is not only raising money for scholarships. By organising the concert themselves, our Scholarship students learn valuable organisational skills that will stand them in good stead in the future. Attached below is the poster they designed for the concert. They also organised and ran an auction of items donated by our supporters, including a book about our late Czech Patron, Karel Schwarzenberg. There was a silent auction for other donated items and again, the students designed and produced the catalogue themelves - attached.
They also ran a week of activities in school including a debate on the impact of globalisation on national and minority cultures. Year 1 students attended a lecture on the roots of the Roma people, Year 2 watched the film How I Became a Partisan and Year 3 took part in a workshop on the Roma Holocaust, followed by a trip to the Lety concentration camp where members of the Roma community were interned during World War II.
Adam, our second Václav Havel Scholar, says: “I’m a Roma boy from the Czech Republic. Studying at the ECP is very important to me. We have loads of Roma people who are highly educated and very respected and they are my role models. But their journey was not easy. My parents always tell me that there should be more Roma people like them so things can change and I absolutely agree. That’s why I’m so glad that the start to my journey can be much easier than theirs, thanks to the Václav Havel Scholarship, without which I would not be able to attend the English College in Prague.” He concluded: “We are studying at a school where the colour of your skin, your accent, nationality, sexual orientation or religion play no role in how you are accepted. We really value this and thus we would like to facilitate an opportunity for another Roma student to be able to study at our school.”
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