On Thursday 11  April Janice Dawson and Beth Mandebura were invited to a celebration being held by Migration Yorkshire for a new Roma Matrix project that is being ran in 10 countries and funded by the European Union. The project will fund health champions to work within Roma communities in their own prospective country including, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Poland. We met some interesting people who are working with Roma communities in big cities such as Glasgow, who were surprised that Halifax had such a large and growing Roma community, (we dealt with nearly 1000 resident enquiries within  2 months) but praised us on the frontline work we are doing to integrate and help this new community. We hope to do some partnership work in future and mirror some of each other’s good practices. Last year Migration Yorkshire awarded Halifax Central Initiative some funding to run a Roma Citizenship project, from this a successful Halifax Roma group was set up, members have attendee scrutiny , local services, set up a free community Zumba class, produced a DVD that has be shown at various meetings and events and built confidence within the community for people to come forward and declare themselves Roma. For more information contact janice.dawson@calderdale.gov.uk