Milan Šimečka Foundation, the Slovak partner of the flagship project, adapted the project to the activities of the Foundation which have been carried out in recent years. Proposed activities incorporate existing projects and methodologies used within its human rights education and the Holocaust education program as well as community activities in the Neighborhood Panenská.

Neighborhood Panenská is located in the Old Town of Bratislava, few hundred meters from the Bratislava Castle. The Neighborhood has been traditionally a genuinely multicultural environment with people of varied ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds. It has been a well-known milieu for people interested in arts and has been known for its friendly atmosphere towards people with different sexual identities. Last, but not least, the locality is a place of residence of many families and individuals of all generations and various professional backgrounds.

Institutions located in the Panenská locality include seats of various non-governmental organizations, international and national business companies, foreign embassies, the Jewish religious community, Evangelical Church, Korean Christian Association, Evangelical Elementary School, Elementary School of Milan Hodža, intellectual bookstore Artforum, public library, cafés and galleries run by natives as well as expats, international hostel and other institutions which shape a truly multicultural atmosphere of the locality.

The project Neighborhood Panenská is envisioned as a long-term series of educational and community activities within the peculiar multicultural environment of Bratislava. It is thus planned to continue also beyond the 2008 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

In the initial phases of the project cooperation with the local school has been established. Several lectures and interactive workshops have already been delivered to the students of upper grades of the school. These enriched the school curriculum with new methods which dynamized the learning process and enabled the exploration of topics which are linked to intercultural issues and are largely relevant for the Slovak context. Major innovation of the adopted methodology is based analysis of textual and visual „small histories“ of ordinary people vis-à-vis major events of the „grand history“ as usually taught. Students were also engaged in an attractively designed field research of the actual Neighborhood in order to uncover the „tangible“ traces of historical developments.

It is envisioned that the cooperation with the school will continue also the next school year and the activities will be broadened to other educational institutions. In the long run we plan to link the ongoing community activities with the newly implemented activities at educational institutions in order to further strengthen the communitarian consciousness in the multicultural environment of the Neighborhood Panenská.