Another warm summer day in Warsaw, again tempting us to go outside into the sunshine. Fortunately we had some great speakers who gave us good reasons to stay inside and pay attention. The day’s program covered three particularly vulnerable groups – socioeconomically marginalized children, refugees, and disabled people – whose needs Polish society is struggling to meet. The individuals we were introduced to and the NGOs they represent, (Przemysław Sendzielski from Aim High (Mierz Wysoko) Association, Agnieszka Kosowicz from the Polish Migration Forum, Katarzyna Kubin from the Social Diversity Forum , and Magda Szarota of the Association of Disabled Women ONE.pl) are taking steps to correct those failings, but, as with so many of the admirable projects we’ve seen during the program, it’s clear that ensuring full human rights for these groups is a long struggle that is far from finished.
Personally, the highlight of my day was the first session with the Aim High (Mierz Wysoko) Foundation, which works with children from poor homes, often in welfare housing, in the Praga district. The foundation’s work reminded me a lot of the culture and ethic of a community center that I volunteered with in Sao Paulo some years ago, and I know the enormous challenges involved at this level of human rights work. Aim High works on the ground at the most direct and personal level. Of course government and city policies matter to the organization, but Aim High chooses to work on the front lines of human rights. Their deeply committed volunteers and employees play with the neighborhood kids right on the street, and organize workshops and activities for them. Every case here is subjective and personal, and Aim High tries to understand each child’s situation and when possible to intervene with their families, with the police and state authorities to give the kids a better chance at social stability and a future in society. Since many of the organizations we’ve been seeing focus on human rights advocacy on the policy level, it was good to be reminded that human rights work is not only about paperwork and research and business suits, but that addressing human rights violations ultimately involves dealing directly with individuals facing very difficult circumstances. I find it deeply unfair that both in terms of money and of prestige, such hands-on human rights work is never rewarded as highly as policy level work. Still, it is heartening to see that many people don’t care about prestige and continue doing vital grass-roots work.
At the end of the day, Iwa Kos, one of the fellows from our team, facilitated a discussion that got us to focus on precisely this aspect of human rights work: that solutions need to be found at the individual, communal, and legislative levels, but that at the most personal level every single case demands immediate individual solutions that, unfortunately, are the most difficult to find and implement. Iwa summarized the stories of two actual individuals in Poland struggling with disability, gender and immigrant rights, and we had to brainstorm solutions at all three levels for their situation. In both cases it was easier for us to find communal and legal solutions, and very difficult to find immediate solutions to their unique combination of problems.
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| Przemysław Sendzielski, Aim High Association |
Our lectures and training so far have given us a great grasp of legal and social advocacy work, but I feel that we cannot learn how to tailor specific solutions to individual cases until we get out of the classroom and get hands-on experience in direct human rights work. I guess that’s the challenge we will all face after the HIA Summer Program: taking the general lessons learnt here and applying them to specific problems in the real world, where all problems and cases are far more difficult than they appear on paper.
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| Katarzyna Kubin, Social Diversity Forum and Agnieszka Kosowicz, Polish Migration Forum |
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| Magda Szarota, Association of Women with Disabilities ONE.pl |
