The NO hate practitioners' meeting. Mainstreaming best practices, organized by the Civil Society Development Foundation (Romania) took place in Bucharest 1 – 4 March 2017.

The main aim of this event was to share experience and discuss possible mainstreaming of best practices related to countering hate speech in Europe. Participants from more than ten European countries were invited to share national realities related to the hate speech topic, to discuss differences in approaches used in different countries in order to counteract hate speech, and to plan new joint interventions in their local communities. The event was a great opportunity to share the methodology and objectives of the project Coalition of Positive Messengers to Counter Online Hate Speech, implemented by 7 EU countries and coordinated by SDA. Snezhina Gabova from SDA participated in the event and presented the project in the first of the NoHate Talk sessions in the program. Under the Coalitions project several training sessions for local stakeholders to design counter narratives to hate speech will be held in the partner countries (among them Croatia, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece). Interested CSOs will be invited to attend the local training sessions organized by SDA‘s partner in each of these countries. The event in Bucharest was an important forum to establish new connections and to exchange fresh ideas on an important but also challenging topic as hate speech.