Empowering 50 rural young people in Oaxaca, Mexico

Recently we held the last four collective virtual seedbeds of this generation and a face-to-face meeting to close the stage of thematic meetings and to initiate or start community initiatives of each participant. The follow-up and accompaniment of participants continues to be carried out by both the organization's team and the tutors. In the previous report we shared the incorporation of former participants of the School for the Common Good (SCG) Mixteca 2018, with the new role of tutors that would accompany the new participants of the SCG Mixteca 2020. This new role of tutors within the SCG has been fundamental for the accompaniment of participants of the current generation within the context of the health contingency, for two reasons: due to the geographical proximity and the experience of tutors as former participants of the SCG process. Between April and May of this year, the participants defined the idea of a community initiative that they wanted to carry out together with their groups. Ten participants presented initiatives, nine of which are currently being implemented.

Despite the Pandemic, with the support of all the people who have been with us this year, we have been able to continue transforming lives!

Since to date, we have been working with 7 former participants of the School for the Common Good, Mixteca, who, based on a rethinking of the strategy of accompaniment to the 25 new young participants of the ebc, have been assigned other tasks and act as their tutors. In general, the activities they carry out are:

The tutors have made visits to the mentored persons, participated in monthly dialogues with facilitators to address questions about follow-up and about the issues that have been provided in the seedbeds.

Four online meetings-workshops were held with various themes aimed at improving community organization and reflection on caring for the space.

To date, the young participants are implementing six community projects in their communities in response to the COVID19 emergency, with actions to improve nutrition, food cultivation, rescue and use of traditional medicine, dissemination of information on health care benefiting at least 400 people. And they are about to start 10 new projects in the next few months.

About the problems we encountered while implementing the project: Since the activities have been entirely done in a virtual mode, the most difficult task has been to achieve clarity in the indications. Since being in the online sessions, communication is often cut off because the signal is unstable. Apart from the technical problems, the fact of minimizing face-to-face visits has been complicated, since in general, the Community IDEAS processes have always been designed to be close and thus
facilitate the connection with the participants and with the community, as well as to recognize the environment in which the activities proposed by the participants will take place.

Currently, It continues with remote tracking and online seedlings. The choice of tutors by geographical proximity has served to allow some of the participants to meet their tutors and achieve better results. The use of other virtual tools has also been opted for, and horizontality has been achieved in the process.

We are sure that although these are difficult times, the School for the Common Good will continue to carry out its activities, and the young people who have been trained so far will obtain good results with their projects for the benefit of their communities.