Štefan Straka

Stefan is combating the lack of integration and food insecurity of the Roma and other marginalized populations in Slovakia by connecting these communities to idle land resources. By bringing together fragmented stakeholders, he is enabling a formerly nomadic and highly marginalized population to farm the land as a source of subsistence, economic opportunity, and connection to community.

Stefan identified two latent assets in rural Slovakia: idle people and idle land. Where others have seen these as problems, Stefan saw opportunity. Most of the poorest families in rural Slovakia are the historically nomadic Roma, who were subject to forced settlement policies under the communist regime of the mid-20th century. Because of their history, the sedentary and permanent activity of cultivating land was never an activity undertaken by or made available to this population. Stefan is changing this for the Roma as well as others who are marginalized to the periphery of society for various reasons. By linking idle human and land resources, he is building a new community-based identity for the poorest and most marginalized communities in the region while improving their food security and economic opportunity. Stefan brings together land owners (primarily the state and the church) with other public and private stakeholders to create opportunity for the Roma community and other marginalized people to use idle land for organic farming. By connecting these excluded communities to the land, he is creating in-kind income (food and energy) and development opportunities that ensure their self-sufficiency, enabling a sense of purpose and permanence, and breaking the cycle of exclusion and discrimination by shifting public perceptions of this population. Stefan’s model builds work ethic and long-term planning skills and opens up new opportunities for food security. The families he works with improve their nutritional status and find a new identity as farmers with connection to land and purpose. This creates new bonds between this population and their neighbors, who now see them as productive members of the community, thus breaking the cycle of exclusion and negative stereotyping. Stefan’s initiative has changed the minds of early skeptics and caught the attention of the government, the church, NGOs, and foundations, all of whom are now looking at his work as a best practice and working with him to replicate it.

Poverty among the Roma community is one of the most challenging development issues facing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe where their estimated number totals to almost six million people. While living standards have declined for all population groups during the transition to market economy, there are growing indications that conditions have deteriorated most severely for Roma than for others, and that Roma have been poorly positioned to take advantage of emerging economic and civic opportunities. Poverty among Roma is complex and multidimensional and is related to a broad range of factors, including poor health, nutrition and educational status, limited chances in the labor market, discrimination, which together contribute to their exclusion.
In the rural eastern Slovakia, there are over two hundred thousand Roma people. They are a traditionally nomadic group who were forced to settle down in Slovakia several decades ago. Accustomed to a nomadic life, they struggle to connect to a sense of place or feel ownership towards their environment. With little connection to the land or the existing communities around them, the Roma face severe social exclusion and discrimination from the larger Slovakian (and Eastern European) society. There are more than 800 Roma settlements across Slovakia today. Long-term unemployment rates within these communities are very high (sometimes reaching up to 100%). It is typical for Roma community members to have little access to education, struggle to find employment and to survive on state support. There are very few opportunities or role models and there are few incentives for the community to develop skills or to find employment outside of their immediate environment. Most income generation opportunities available to Roma are in the informal sector, often in construction. There are almost no job opportunities for women and in most cases, they stay home to care for large families. More than half of all Roma families report that they have experienced situations where they couldn’t feed their children. This leads some families into the trap of indebtedness. Another consequence is growing alcoholism pushing impoverished Roma (and non-Roma) of the region who have lost hope and sense of purpose in life to the margins of society. Given that Roma history and culture is developed for a more nomadic lifestyle, there is almost no practice of long-term planning and most employ strategies geared toward short-term survival. With the odds stacked against them, negative stereotypes against the Roma communities prevail, and extreme hostility and hate speech is directed towards them. When one looks at the broader Slovakian economy, agriculture in has been in severe decline throughout the last few decades. The concept of family farming was unable to gain traction- and most agricultural land is stuck without a known owner and in the process of restitution following the end of the communist regime. This land is managed by the State Land Fund and predominantly lies idle and deteriorates. In this context, using agriculture to create systemic social inclusion and strengthen the self-sufficiency of the marginalized population in rural settings is a new approach in the region as most of the existing citizen sector or state support for the Roma population is focused on housing, educational activities and human rights advocacy.

Stefan is building a social integration and community development system centered in agriculture in order to increase the food and energy self-sufficiency of Roma families, provide them with the sense or permanence and purpose, and tear down the walls between Roma and non-Roma. The fact that Roma from rural areas of Central Europe have never before been systematically engaged in farming activities was a striking revelation to Stefan. This led him to identify and address the reasons: the lack of a tradition, interest and skills in farming among the Roma, and their lack of access to land and materials. In order to address the first, Stefan works with carefully selected community leaders and through them reaches out to, engages and trains marginalized Roma and non-Roma families (mostly women) in a wide spectrum of agricultural work. Community leaders, who often have some experience with agriculture, share their knowledge on processes of soil cultivation, organic crop harvesting, seed management, irrigation and natural waste management with participants. Stefan fosters interest in this previously foreign work by remunerating families with supplies of self-grown food and wood for heating, and by closely intertwining farming with open-air cultural activities lying at the core of Roma culture. Stefan turns farms into informal centers of community life where Roma and non-Roma alike develop a habit of

STEFAN STRAKA Slovakia, 2015

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coming together to connect and celebrate life. With the goal of eradicating barriers for women in farming, Stefan supports them in organizing small self-help groups that provide child care while mothers are working at the farm. The harvest from the farms is distributed among hundreds of Roma and non-Roma volunteers with surplus being sold at the organic farmer markets. Revenue is fully re-invested into the development and expansion of the model. In order to address the lack of access to land, Stefan introduces communities that are willing to grow crops to the opportunity of a long-term lease of idle agricultural land from either the State Land Fund or Church (second largest landowner in Central Europe after the state). He has discovered a great divide between the vast amounts of idle land on the one hand and emerging farmers on the other hand, and realized that a long-term lease is a solution beneficial both for land owners (neglected land is turned into land for plowing) and also for new farmers (as it allows for strengthening food security at minimal to no cost and can serve as a training ground and springboard for further development). Once farmers in new communities are motivated, strong team leaders are identified, land is secured and farmers are ready to start, Stefan provides a start-up package of farming materials and equipment. Stefan realized that there is a vast amount of resources available for investment in furthering social inclusion in Central Europe but very little collaboration between the supporters. Thus, Stefan has become a convener who brings together major players (foundations, churches, municipalities) that are able to financially contribute to equipping a network of emerging farms. He accumulates resources and distributes the start-up equipment packages to new farms, creating the next link in the support system for new farmers. The packages include equipment and seeds, saplings and substrates from his pilot farms. Stefan set up his first farm in 2006 and the second followed in 2009. Since then, he has managed to disprove a widely spread belief that “Roma-farmer” is an oxymoron and has succeeded in transforming the lives of hundreds of Roma in two communities. Three hundred participants from poor villages, two thirds of whom are Roma and one third of whom are non-Roma, have developed practical farming skills and secured a constant source of healthy self-grown food and heating wood through regular work on the farm. By working at the farm, Roma participants make important connections to non-Roma members from their communities, which allow them to acquire jobs in other fields. Moreover, joint farming and the process of product distribution create natural intersection points and discussion topics for people regardless of their ethnic background, and serve as an avenue for social inclusion. The pilot farms also innovate new technologies and knowledge to share with the target population and replicators. In addition to growing fruits and vegetables, they do landscape cultivation, composting, and bio seed development. They are now thinking of adding fish farming as well. Many families after joining community farming have developed an interest in farming, gained critical working skills and set up their own small gardens. By patiently following the lifecycle of harvest, participants learn basics of inner control, planning for positive change and developing a new long-term perspective. Participants emphasize that working at the farm eradicates the ever-present boredom and apathy and, most importantly, brings in a new sense of purpose. “It’s great we can be here, otherwise we just sit at home totally bored. And what we learn here, we also take home with us. At home we set up our own tiny gardens and already harvest our own tomatoes and some cucumbers. And this all belongs to us and we can feed our family”, says one participant. They become more self-confident, turn into much needed role-models in their communities, develop the sense of permanence and connection to land, become willing to take up responsibility for tomorrow and turn into the ambassadors of farming and recruit more people into the program themselves.
The results of the first two pilot farms transformed the attitude of local authorities towards Roma inclusion from extremely reserved and skeptical into enthusiastic and supportive. The local councils now plan measures to support the expansion of the project. In order to reverse skepticism of wider public and spread the word about successful pilots, Stefan has formed a group of mainstream journalists who have become media ambassadors of Roma-farming project. This strategy soon bore fruit as actively generated media attention, TV reports and newspaper articles have instilled the feeling of pride among the Roma but also the non-Roma inhabitants of villages who saw the activities of this population bringing positive media attention to their community. Moreover, it triggered increased attention to this best practice from government authorities, municipalities, church leaders and citizen sector organizations. Stefan was invited to become an expert in a governmental working group on social inclusion that allows him to lobby for including the term “Roma farming” into the vocabulary of the Social Ministry and for developing prior non-existent mechanisms of state systemic support for Roma farming. In order to further support the replication process with senior human resources, Stefan is planning to build up a network of mayors from those communities where the model is already proven. The aim of the network is for mayors to share their experience, successes and challenges with others, but also to create traction. In order to attract more attention to the project among Roma, Stefan will be engaging celebrities and renowned and socially integrated Roma authorities as “ambassadors”.
Stefan is now turning one of his pilot villages into a model farm and knowledge hub for domestic and foreign replicators who want to set up community farming engagements for marginalized populations. He has identified the two most effective levers for scaling up and reaching a large number of communities in Slovakia and Central Europe. The first one is through collaboration with the Greek-Catholic Church, which has over 200 parishes across the country, owns vast amounts of land (10% of the land in Slovakia), has an expressed interest in advancing food security in the region, and has a network of active priests who are natural community authorities for both Roma and non-Roma people. It has pledged to organize a national convention in the upcoming months in order to inspire more parishes to become farming pioneers with their Roma communities.The second important lever in the region is the government, which owns 80% of the land in Slovakia and has an interest in enabling the productivity of marginalized populations. In fact, the Slovakian government has recently invested 30 million euro in developing a network of 120 state-funded community centers spread through impoverished communities across the whole country. These centers have the mandate of engaging marginalized populations, but there was not a clear plan for how to do so. Stefan saw this as an opportunity and has now become one of the coordinators of this network, using his role to bring his model into the emerging agenda of all of these community centers. He engages community centers’ staff and local Roma and non-Roma leaders as initiators of farms and equips them with the necessary knowledge and equipment. Since his two initial pilots, an additional 14 farming communities have emerged in 2015. Stefan’s plan is to open-up the social integration farming model for thousands of people in Slovakia, with further plans to expand the model through partners in neighboring Czech Republic and Hungary. He sees the relevance of his model also in other (urban) settings and target groups with the main idea of creating conditions for marginalized populations to develop skills in cultivating their environment, taking responsibility for themselves, and developing empathy for their neighbors.

Stefan’s great grandparents belonged to the generation of Europeans who through their hard work earned a good living in the American gold rush and then came back home to start a more comfortable life. Growing up in a well-to-do family that owned land in Eastern Slovakia and was one of the few families who employed Roma for agricultural work, Stefan was exposed from childhood to positive examples of diligent Roma workers and was puzzled and taken aback by the discrepancy between their negative public perception and the reality he was experiencing. As a child Stefan always liked spending time with his Roma and non-Roma friends in the fresh air, and to have a legitimate reason to do so, at the age of 10 he started organizing open-air sport football tournaments for his peers. In order to attract more people he supported his peers in creating and mobilizing sports teams in surrounding villages. However, early on he realized that he was not ready to devote his life to a career in sports. Neither did he want to take up the traditional career path in his family, i.e. running the family construction company. In university he discovered his passion for supporting people from marginalized groups in society to develop their full potential and discover purpose in life. He was deeply affected by the death of his uncle from the over-consumption of alcohol as a result of him losing purpose in life. As a “black sheep” in his family, he embarked upon the path of exploring psychology, psychotherapy, social work and art therapy in order to find way effective ways for people to connect with the sense of purpose. In order to learn more about the topic of connecting people in need with purpose and ignite more students for it, he set up a university discussion club to which he was attracting prominent thinkers and opinion leaders from the field of psychology and social inclusion. Under the influence of Viktor Frankl’s philosophy on the critical importance of connecting people with meaning in life as prevention of marginalization, Stefan has written his PhD on how the loss of purpose in life pushes people to the margins of society. Later on, willing to apply his knowledge in practice, he decided not to become a psychotherapist as most of the desperate people in Eastern Slovakia where he grew up would never go to one as it labels them with stigma in the community for the rest of their life. He found that interaction with nature and using social farming could be one of the most effective and at the same time discreet therapeutic approaches for this target group. Moreover, it could give a boost to sustainable farming in Eastern Slovakia where agriculture has been in significant decline since 1989. He drew inspiration from the Egyptian sustainable farming model “Sekem”, which has shown that farming is possible even in the middle of the desert. Stefan decided that “farming wonders” are needed not only in the harsh climate conditions of Egypt but also in the tough socio-economic conditions of Eastern Slovakia. With no idea how to get land, Stefan went and asked the State Land Fund for a plot. They told him he needed a political guarantor, so he went to the Vice-Premier and asked. The Vice-Premier had a Roma assistant who was excited by Stefan’s idea and convinced the Premier to help Stefan. Stefan then went to the Roma settlements and asked the informal leaders to recommend people. He asked the same at the state employment agency. With land and people, Svatobor was founded in 2006. When he started, the mayor and the village council did not want to support cultivation of the Roma community in the area. Now, all of the village representatives and the mayor have voted to continue the project.