Alexandra Bahor

Alexandra was born into a Roma family in Romania in 1987 and considers herself fortunate that her parents were very keen on education. As a child she had a thirst for knowledge and an inquisitiveness that grew despite the rising sense of hostility she faced from non-Roma people to her educational successes.

She faced abhorrent discrimination growing up, from being made to sit in a particular seat in school to her own father hiding his Roma identity while working as a bus driver, it became common place in her life to suppress her own identity.

She became the first person in her family to go to university where she studied law for four years. During this time, she was once again marginalised and faced negative stereotypes, through examples used in the teaching as well through comments made by fellow students.

Exposure to antigypsyism while growing up and a constant sense of gross injustice upon her family and friends, influenced her to become an activist for Roma rights in her career after university.

She moved to Hungary, where she worked with a volunteering service to increase employability skills for young Roma and raise awareness of Roma history and culture using non-formal education. She was able to identify the lack of understanding between authoritative organisations and Roma, as well as institutionalised racism, and she was able to use her voice to have an impact and to make changes.

She knew that it would be important to continue this work, but that it wouldn’t matter which country she lived in. So, in 2015 Alexandra decided to move to the UK with her partner, and her family joined her in 2016 when she gave birth to her daughter.

It was then that her links with LJMU were forged. Alexandra started working as a community connector with two members of staff from Liverpool Business School, Dr Patricia Jolliffe and Helen Collins, who helped to establish the Roma Education Aspiration Project (REAP).

The community-based research project was developed with partners in response to an observed need within the growing Roma community of Liverpool; young people and their families not aspiring to further and higher education and remaining in kin groups, often in precarious, low-skilled work.

Alexandra was a Liverpool Roma Community Development Worker and helped LJMU to reach members of the community, building a rapport with those who had experienced the same injustices as Alexandra and her family had.

Alexandra said: “The REAP project was the right platform to be able to create a safe place to involve and empower the Roma families to show them the educational opportunities for their children, as well as themselves.”

Alexandra helped the community in many ways, supporting job seeking, benefits support, English classes, housing advice and legal help, while enabling access for LJMU to showcase its own desire to be an inclusive place of education, where everyone regardless of their ethnic group or socioeconomic background is welcome and encouraged to further themselves.

“It is owing to her that we have built the relationships with the Roma community,” says Dr Patricia Jolliffe.

Through Alexandra’s collaboration with LJMU academics, the research findings to date align with wider UK and EU research that shows that Roma are the most disadvantaged group educationally and economically, and stigmatisation of Roma is widespread. Through further funding, they now hope to further influence policy, and work with UK government to increase equity for Roma in the job and education markets, through both policy and practice.

For Alexandra, she has gone on to achieve her master's in law at LJMU and hopes in the future to become the UK’s second only Roma lawyer. She said that her qualification has given her the ‘courage to trust her new skills’ and to develop her professional career. She’s recently taken on a new role as a Senior Community Inclusion Worker with the Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust.

“My main aim right now is to be a role model for my daughter and to give her confidence to fight and show that she has the freedom to choose who she is, who she wants to be and what career she wants to have. It doesn’t matter of the skin colour or that she is part of an ethnic group.”