Who are we?
Tessza Udvarhelyi, PhD (research and organizational development) is a long-time activist and educator. In 2009, she co-founded The City is for All, which organizes homeless people and those who experience housing poverty and demands long-term solutions to the housing crisis in Hungary. Tessza completed her PhD degree at the City University of New York on the criminalization of homelessness, which was partly based on a participatory action research project about the discrimination against homeless people. By empowering homeless people to be researchers themselves, this project has been the first of its kind in Hungary.
Tessza has a strong background in both formal and non-formal education, which is inevitable for developing an organization dedicated to public education. Since 2002 she has worked at a Budapest-based non-profit working called Artemisszió Foundation to advance intercultural learning, where her job is to help develop the organization’s long-term strategy and facilitate training courses on intercultural competence for various target groups. In terms of formal education, she has been an instructor at universities in both New York and Budapest, where she taught subjects ranging from urban studies and social movements to cultural anthropology.
Mariann Dósa (educational programs) is an activist and academic dedicated to public knowledge production. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Social Policy at Oxford University where she examines how the present Hungarian welfare system affects the citizenship of social assistance recipients. Besides investigating social marginalization and gender-based discrimination through academic research she is involved in policy assessment and design in these fields.
Mariann has long been involved in the Budapest-based social justice movement. She is the consulting editor and author of the most well read left political blog in Hungary that publishes progressive articles on a wide range of social injustices affecting Hungarian society. In addition, the blog organizes actions to increase public attention to these injustices and protest against them. She has been a member of The City is for All since 2009 and she is founder of the organization’s only-women working group. Mariann regularly teaches in the Hungarian academic sphere and she holds trainings and workshops in non-formal contexts, mostly for the social justice youth community in Budapest and the members of The City is for All.
Mariann's CV can be accessed here
