Asociatia CED Romania Centrul de Excelenta prin Diversitate

CED Romania, NGO, non-profit was founded in 2010 and focused during the last years on supporting the rights of disabled individuals from the position of advocate of universal access in physical and virtual environments. Since 2014, our scope of work is connected to accessible tourism as a fundamental right, seen from the perspective of both social responsibility and as a market opportunity for the organizations acting the tourism sector. Therefore, our work and projects relate to: - assessment and improvement of tourist destination accessibility; - development, promotion, marketing and communication of accessible tourist destinations; - accessible tourism training and education of students and staff in tourist service chain; - education and training of (physically) disabled in subjects connected to (accessible) tourism, aiming to improve job occupancy and entrepreneurship; - development of a logistic base, physical and virtual, required in the accessibility assessment, education, training, marketing and promotion processes and projects. For this purpose, we developed networking activities with public and private entities sharing our interests, including Tourism Faculties and disabled associations, at both national and international level, and are conducting extensive research and documentation that support us in designing projects and identifying appropriate financing for implementing the project ideas. With the support of volunteers, we designed projects covering subjects such as: - child and youth travel destinations in Romania; - www.TabaraSculpturaGalati.ro, a cultural project aiming to support and continue 40+ years of tradition in organizing the Metal Sculpture camp in Galati, Romania (a city that hosts the greatest open-air metal art exhibition in Eastern Europe). The project was financed by the Romanian Ministry of Culture, and CED was involved as partner; - research and documentation on accessible travel good practices and awareness raising actions; - research and documentation on global initiatives in accessible tourism education and training; - www.AccessibleRomania.com, a project aimed to promote accessibility in Romania, listed in the Accessible Tourism Directory Pantou; - we supported our partners from Sano Touring www.sanotouring.eu in designing the first Accessible Romania and Accessible Bucharest travel guides, in English and German, in both printed and electronic format, and we are currently turning these guides in accessible pdf formats.