Description of organisation

Carusel aims to improve the quality of life for drug and alcohol users, sex workers or individuals who have multiple sex partners, persons who live on the streets, socially and economically challenged people end the ones that are at risk of getting sick or facing social exclusion. The mission of Carusel is to create an active, proactive and reactive social environment, in order to promote and defend the human rights and civil liberties.

The organization was built in early 2011 by a group of activists and professionals in the field of harm reduction. Carusel has been rapidly growing since the beginning and it became a very active organization in the harm reduction field, both in terms of direct service delivery and advocacy.

Carusel militates for evidence based interventions among vulnerable groups, especially Roma, drug users and sex workers, for human rights defense and promotion, for reducing the social inequalities among citizens, for community development and legislative changes in terms of access to low threshold harm reduction services for most at risk injecting drug users and sex workers.

Carusel is a human rights harm reduction organization. First of all, we focus our activity on providing social and medical services for most vulnerable people, those affected by multiple vulnerabilities, such as poor housing, drug use, HIV/ Hepatitis/ Tuberculosis, lack of ID papers and/ or medical insurance, low level of education, stigma and discrimination. We create our own network of social and medical services in order to help people from these groups to access the social and medical system. As a second sphere of action, Carusel developed some other activities such as: advocating for legislative changes in order to open drug consumption rooms in Bucharest), monitoring police activities related to people from disadvantaged groups, we are involved in providing training for public and private entities (human rights, antidiscrimination, HIV/ AIDS, drug use dynamics), conducting studies (e.g.: Female Sex Workers: Social Networks and Access to Public Services, 2017; Sex work: stigma and marginalization, 2015).

We are working in strong cooperation with both public, and private institutions. Among our long-term partners, we can list the National Antidrug Agency, the National Council for Combating Discrimination, Romanian Harm Reduction Network, Hospital for Infectious and Tropical Diseases "Dr. Victor Babes", National Institute of Infectious Diseases "Prof. Dr. Matei Bals", University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Sastipen, Bucharest Metropolitan Library, Associazione BIR, CNASR, UNOPA, Youth for Youth Foundation, Romanian Angel’s Appeal, Ce-Re, and Active Watch.

Inclusion topics

This organisation is willing to involve volunteers who face situations which make their participation in activities more difficult, from the following categories for different types of project:

• Economic obstacles
• Health problems
• Social obstacles