MACZNÉ PLETSER ÁGNES (BUDAPEST)

Experienced expert, community organizer and educational organizer

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For more than two decades, she has been working with children and families living in poverty, exclusion, refugee status or educational disadvantage. As an experienced expert of Roma origin, she understands help not as charity, but as partnership. Her work is based on personal presence, the slow building of trust and the recognition that those affected are the shapers of their own lives and decisions.

She has been involved in programs supporting disadvantaged families since 2004. She participated in the work of the Hungarian Anti-Poverty Network, worked at the Nap-Sukár Tanoda and the Gyöngyöspata Roma community, where she built relationships with parents and local families in addition to providing educational support. During the 2015 refugee crisis, she organized accommodation, food and practical assistance for refugees.

Since 2022, she has been one of the founders and operational leaders of the Zugliget Peace School, and then the Taléta Intercultural Center and Incubator House. She has organized pedagogical, social, psychological and community support for Roma children and their families from Transcarpathia, who arrived from war, often from extreme poverty and segregated educational environments. She has connected educators, psychologists, social workers, volunteers, university students, church and civil society actors, while maintaining personal contact with the families.

Taléta has developed into an intercultural community space where Transcarpathian Roma, Józsefváros, Afghan, Vietnamese, Hungarian, Roma and non-Roma children and adults meet. Children receive learning assistance and community, and parents receive administrative, employment and language support. High school and university volunteers learn in real relationships what poverty, racism, being a refugee and social responsibility mean. Its work creates encounters against exclusion, personal acquaintance against prejudice, and solidarity in action instead of indifference.