Together Intercultural Project (1994-1995)

The main project goal was to promote mutual tolerance and better understanding of the multicultural diversity in Bulgaria as essential values of a democratic pluralistic society.

The project activities included an international seminar on Bulgarian and European experience in different cultural groups living together. At the seminar, building up a strategy on resolving these problems in Bulgaria was also discussed.

Within the project, four regional workshops on this subject-matter were also organized. They were attended by teachers and opinion-makers who took great interest in the discussion about the education problems in these regions in the perspective of tolerance for “the other”.

The publications within the project included further two issues of the Together magazine, published within an earlier project of ACCESS – The Anne Frank Appeal for Tolerance (1993). They address the children at the age between 10 and 18. Their main message appeals to neglecting the differences and to starting a dialogue based on common values.

Within the project, ACCESS also published in Bulgarian Us-Them. A Concise Ethnopolitical Dictionary (Mostly for Citizens of the Republic of Bulgaria Under Identity-Card Age). The dictionary tries to step into the field of education, avoiding being didactic, through encouraging reflection on highly controversial “ethnic” issues.

Having the characteristics of an unconventional intercultural education handbook, it provoked great interest not only among its target group, but also among secondary school teachers and university lecturers, university students, researchers, human rights activists in Bulgaria and abroad, etc.

The success of the dictionary paved the way for publishing a second revised edition in 1997, as well as for the Us-Them. A Concise Ethnopolitical Dictionary Project accomplished in 2002, which provided for the translation of the second edition in Turkish and Roma.