For George Soros, the idea of an open society did not merely exist in the abstract, where the rights of individuals were protected against the state. It was also personal to him. “An open society,” he once said, “is one in which a person like me can live and prosper.” As a Jew in Hungary, he survived Nazi rule and experienced the Soviet occupation. The difference between an open and closed society, he realized, was not just about the protection of minority opinions, but also the protection of minority communities. 

When communism fell in 1989, political freedoms expanded across newly independent countries, but the economic and social rights of minorities like the Roma remained elusive—the community still marginalized and impoverished. “In every country I visited,” Soros recalled, “I saw the same pattern. Roma communities were denied access to decent housing, employment, health care, and education.”  

The prejudice against the Roma was also designed to hold them back. For example, many children were placed in schools for students with disabilities. When Soros met young, educated Roma who had defied the odds stacked against them, they shared that they had concealed their identities in order to succeed. “I recognized something of my own past in their struggle,” he said. 

That recognition became one of the longest-running commitments in modern European philanthropy. By the mid-1990s, Soros had created a network of Open Society foundations across Central and Eastern Europe, directing unprecedented resources toward Roma inclusion—education, early childhood initiatives, cultural programs, and the first systematic efforts to litigate against anti-Roma discrimination. It was not charity but infrastructure: a way of seeding a civil movement of well-educated Roma activists.

In 2023, Alex Soros, who succeeded his father as chair of Open Society, announced the launch of the Roma Foundation for Europe, supporting a new generation of Roma leaders working across the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Its goal is to not only serve as a foundation that stands with the Roma as they advocate for change, but, as Zeljko Jovanovic, the president of the Roma Foundation for Europe, says, to contribute to “a European future grounded in justice and fairness.”

Building Roma Civil Society

Born in Serbia, Jovanovic grew up listening to his father strategize with other members of the Roma Political Party. He joined the Otpor protests, organized by the pro-democracy movement that was founded in 1998. After the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević’s government, he saw firsthand how the Roma community was sidelined. “We weren’t on the agenda,” he says. He learned a hard lesson. “Democracy changes the playing field, but it doesn’t solve our problems.”

In 2006, he joined the Open Society Foundations, becoming director of the Roma Initiatives Office. He still remembers how Soros listened to him when he was just a junior staff member. “I learned so much from him—his humility, how he values ideas over hierarchy, and focuses on change, not bureaucracy.”

Looking back, Jovanovic sees how Soros allowed Roma to shape his thinking. “We started with cultural initiatives, then education and litigation, but over time George understood the problem was much deeper. It was vast—beyond what philanthropy alone could solve.”

In 2005, Soros and World Bank President James Wolfensohn launched the Decade of Roma Inclusion, which aimed to close the gaps between Roma and the rest of society, but when the 2008 financial crisis hit, austerity measures gave governments an excuse to slash spending, including for the Roma. Once accepted into the European Union, these countries no longer needed to prove their commitment to minority rights; many stopped. 

“Through the foundation, and with thousands of Roma advocates empowered along the way across Central and Eastern Europe, concrete proposals were put forward for government action,” says Jovanovic. “Most governments, however, failed to act.”

Moreover, many of the same governments Soros helped in the EU accession process are now virulently attacking him—invoking conspiracy theories for political gain and accusing him of undermining their countries.

Soros, however, has never wavered in his commitment to the Roma. He used the crisis as an opportunity. Open Society then developed a program to help governments capitalize on EU funds in Central and Eastern Europe. In parallel, the organization’s Early Childhood, Higher Education, and Public Health programs also targeted Roma communities. The EU had a vast pool of resources through its Cohesion Funds, so Soros created Making the Most of EU Funds for Roma, an instrument to connect the Roma Decade objectives to EU financial resources.

“Suddenly, the Open Society Foundations became the global center for Roma policy expertise,” said Jovanovic.

Following French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2010 crackdown on Roma camps around Paris, deporting hundreds of Roma, the European Commission followed Open Society’s lead to create an EU Roma Framework that required governments to implement national Roma policies.

The Open Society Justice Initiative also pioneered strategies to combat Europe’s racial discrimination, particularly the policy of labeling Roma children “mentally disabled” and sending them off to specialized schools. In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic that the rights of Roma children were being violated. It was a landmark case modeled on Brown v. Board of Education. “There’s an economics to this kind of segregation,” says Jovanovic. “Schools get more funding for ‘special needs’ children. That creates incentives to mislabel Roma kids.” More education cases ensued in Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, and Croatia.

Early Childhood Development

Legal victories can only go so far, especially when governments simply ignore court rulings. Stanislav Daniel, who grew up in Slovakia in the 1980s—the years of assimilation—saw the problem firsthand. At 19, Daniel was on a fast track out of the Roma world when he decided he wanted to know more about his country’s Roma community. The only place to do that was the social work department, where they focused on excluded Roma communities. He realized quickly that individual support could not possibly address systemic racism.

“You can work 24 hours every day and not achieve much. Still, those people will face racism and anti-Roma attitudes,” he says. “I started thinking I have to move to the systemic level.” He began working with the European Roma Rights Center on education, housing, and employment. Racism still puts so many roadblocks in the way of housing and employment for Roma, but education has a little more opportunity. “Racists might still agree that kids are innocent, and for our part, if we started early, we could possibly put them on the right track.” 

This was the 1990s, when early education was emerging as an important field backed up by new scientific research on brain development. Fraser Mustard, a Canadian icon and leader in the field, met with Soros and suggested his education efforts needed to start focusing on pregnancy and the first critical six years of childhood. 

“I was inspired—in addition to the impact on the region’s approach to education, I saw here an approach that could also support the region’s Roma children, who faced enormous, entrenched prejudice and economic challenges that impacted their chance at a strong beginning,” Soros said in 2020. And out of that meeting with Mustard he developed the Step by Step program with Phyllis Magrab, a pediatric psychologist, and her team at Georgetown University.

Soros committed $100 million to the program and, in 1994, launched an early childhood education initiative, based on new scientific research on the unprecedented development of the brain during pregnancy and the first few years of a child’s life. Rooted in a “learn through play” approach for parents and children, the program worked in 15 countries across Central Europe and Eurasia.

With Step by Step, Daniel was able to develop the Romani Early Years Network to bring together teachers, health workers, social workers, and mediators from different communities who often felt isolated and alone in their work. Although the Open Society program has closed, the field endures, with many organizations securing funding from other sources. “Moreover, governments now talk about early childhood development in ways they never did before,” says Daniel. “The footprint George left is huge.”

Education

Like Petrushovska, Ciprian Necula, chair of the Roma Education Fund (REF) has fought disinformation targeted at Roma throughout his career. Just the day before we spoke from his home in Bucharest, a Romanian member of parliament trying to undermine Roma civil society sent messages to the American Embassy claiming Soros is supporting efforts to “turn Roma children into gays.”

The parliament member is clearly trying to exploit the current political climate. But, says Necula, “I don’t think it will work.”

Necula’s activism began as a teenager in Bucharest. In high school, he says, he was frustrated about having to hide his identity. For him, the public image of Roma was a disaster. One day he was inspired when he saw a Roma MP on television whose father was a great musician and conductor in Romania, and he wasn’t hiding his heritage.

At university he discovered an intellectual mentor in the sociologist and founder of the modern Roma movement, Nicolae Gheorghe. For the next years, he advocated and fought for Roma rights in every corner—as a media personality, as a state secretary for EU funds, and as co-founder of Aresel (meaning “enough” in Romani). 

For nearly two decades, the Roma Education Fund has awarded over 20,000 scholarships, but closing the gap between Roma and non-Roma, he says, is not something an NGO can do alone. “We want to create resilient communities through education, so people have the means to come back from shocks.” 

Necula calls the new approach “leapfrogging.” Inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “Why wait 100 years?” mantra, this strategy vaults Roma communities to where systems are now—academically, digitally, and economically. “Copy-paste programs don’t work when times change,” he argues. He says this particularly applies to segregation. “If a Roma district has 5,000 people, the law says it needs a school. The answer isn’t bussing kids into neighborhoods where they face daily racism. It’s making the local school excellent—that’s what produces social change.” 

Digital learning—once “the devil”—is now foundational. “We have to meet reality where it is: AI, online platforms, gaming, robotics, and sports.” 

Necula has seen passionate teachers creating miracles, like the 300 university graduates produced in the Romanian village of Take, out of a population of 8,000.

He, along with other Roma leaders, are trying to translate education into jobs. “Europe faces a huge labor shortage—an aging demographic crisis. Roma are the youngest population.” This offers a great economic opportunity. The World Bank has shown that if Roma are in the labor market, 4 billion euros can be added to the Romanian budget. And that’s just one country. 

“The horizon is long,” he says. “But if all goes well, we’ll see social change in 15 years.”

Cultural Renaissance and Representation

At the same time as the Open Society Foundations and EU policy networks were expanding, a new cultural movement was taking shape among well-educated Roma. One of its founders is Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, a Polish anthropologist who grew up in southern Poland.

“My grandparents were illiterate peasants,” she says. “Under communism, 9 of their 10 children finished school and went to university. It created mobility—but also conformity. After the transition to democracy, racism came back, raw and unfiltered.”

Mirga-Kruszelnicka, who studied anthropology in Kraków and Barcelona, focused her research on Roma youth movements. Reflecting on her experiences, she describes a recurring pattern in government consultations with Roma communities: “We called it the ritual of participation,” she says. “They would invite us, tick the box, and change nothing.”

In 2013, Mirga-Kruszelnicka joined an informal group of artists, academics, and activists who began imagining a cultural embassy for Roma. “For years, our identity and history were treated as folklore,” she says. “We wanted to normalize Roma culture, not exoticize it.” They envisioned a space that would merge art and democracy. “An institution that would protect our language, our art, our memory, and a place where Roma could tell our own stories.” 

It was time to counter stereotypes of victimization, sterilization, and mass execution during World War II—what Roma refer to as “the devouring”—with stories of heroism, of Roma soldiers, Roma partisans, and Roma civilians who saved children.

That brainstorm gave birth to the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) which launched in Berlin in 2017 in collaboration with Alliance for the European Roma Institute. Open Society and the Council of Europe, provided institutional, material, and financial support.  

“At first, the EU rejected it, fearing other minorities like the Catalans, for example, would demand similar institutions,” says Jovanovic, also a member of the informal group of activists. “It took five years of campaigning to win approval from all 47 council members.”

Mirga-Kruszelnicka credits Soros’s willingness to take risks—and to let go. “When he said he wanted us to lead ourselves, he meant it. ERIAC was born because he trusted that vision.”

Within a few years of its launch, the institute co-curated the acclaimed Barvalo exhibition at Marseille’s MUCEM, showing the intertwined history of Roma and Europeans, presented the first Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and created the Roma Heroes project.

Some of ERIAC’s work sparked controversy. “Our artists are also feminist, queer, political,” Mirga-Kruszelnicka says. “That can shock conservative audiences, including some Roma. But culture must challenge. Roma are not here to decorate Europe’s conscience—we’re here to expand it.” 

Today the institute, prominently located near the German parliament, publishes volumes on the Romani, and advises European governments on cultural inclusion. “We are no longer asking to be invited,” Mirga-Kruszelnicka says. “We are hosting.” 

Political Participation

While there have been advances for the Roma in education and culture, their political exclusion remains stark. There is not a single member of the European Parliament to represent the continent’s 12 million Roma. In individual countries, like Slovakia, there have only been modest gains at the local and national levels.

Mensur Haliti, a vice president at the Roma Foundation for Europe, has spent his career trying to change that. Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, he saw an old country disappear and new ones emerge in its place, with the Roma falling through the cracks created by the conflicts.

Haliti has spent his career trying to change that. 

“For Roma in Kosovo, the borders of belonging shifted faster than the borders on maps,” Haliti recalled. “One day, we were citizens. The next day, we became uncertain guests in our own country. More than 100,000 Roma were forced to flee—many disappeared, many were killed, and what they left behind was taken. It became an image too familiar in Roma memory: the disappearance of home, and the justice that never came.”

After university, Haliti worked in nonprofit organizations and public institutions, where he acquired the tools to defend Roma self-determination, but also saw, up close, what he describes as “the quiet violence of inclusion.” There were invitations to participate in discussions, but never the power to decide on policy.

Joining Open Society in 2011 changed that. “For the first time,” Haliti says, “I entered an institution capable of operating at the scale our history required.” The philanthropy’s goal was to replace symbolic inclusion with structural participation. The question they grappled with was no longer whether Roma could lead, but whether they could govern on their own authority. It’s an ambition guided by the values of Romanipe, the Roma system of informal, unwritten law and self-government, a moral and political order that has endured for centuries without territory and without recognition.

In 2023, the Roma Foundation for Europe was created as a new independent foundation led by Roma leaders with a €100 million pledge from Open Society, announced by Alex Soros, the chair. The new foundation, he said, was “dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Roma people, overcoming the deep-rooted barriers they face.” 

Alex Soros’s commitment to the Roma grew out of the visits he made to Europe with his parents as a child, meeting Roma leaders and their families. “Those experiences left a lasting impression on me, and they shaped my own commitment to human rights.” The enduring discrimination against the Roma is not a question of a single community; it is a threat to all of Europe. There cannot be rights for all when they are denied to some. For him, like his father, the Roma are not merely a vulnerable or marginalized people. They are a community of pride, potential and strength—and an essential part of Europe’s future.