Support 50 trainees on Social Development Projects

Along with the work we have been doing in Aguascalientes, Oaxaca, Cuajimalpa and Chimalhuacán, these past weeks we have been very busy in Coyoacán. Here is a bit of what’s been happening.

New endeavors

As we announced previously, Tlalaná is now in Santa Úrsula. We are about to finish our “Starting and strengthening social development projects” workshop. We have had 10 young enthusiasts that are starting to work with us. The sessions have been “interesting, entertaining and full of knowledge”, as one 14-year-old participant put it. He is interested in starting a community bike project, we will be working along with him to make it come true. Other ideas that are present in this laboratory are a soccer tournament for the Santa Úrsula community, a cultural hub and an artistic project that promotes freedom of expression and Mexican cultural values through history. We are very excited to start collaborating with these new collectives that are targeting young people with addiction problems, violence in families and environmental awareness in their communities.

Public event: “Feria de colectivos”

Along with this undertaking, we started promoting our own work within the community. With this in mind, we staged a participatory event in a park in the center of Santa Úrsula. The event was a success, more than 100 people attended and not even the rain stopped people from coming from all over the area, one of Mexico City’s most diverse socio-economically speaking. We are targeting the most marginalized groups of young people. For this, we are starting alliances with the rest of the community from that same area, who will be participating in this process side by side with us. The objective is to involve people in the development of their own community starting by recognizing the value of their help through empowerment, design for sustainability and proactivity. Our motto for this campaign is “Doing whatever you like, you can help anyone alike”.

Learning from our peers, doing for our community

While working, we have always tried to exchange knowledge and ideas with the people we collaborate with. In doing so, we try to always learn and apply what we learn from them. This time, we decided to take action and start our own vegetable garden. Following the example of DHS Guadalupe Peralta and Dkaya Ybaku, Tlalaná Network collectives in Aguascalientes and Oaxaca that work in environmentally sustainable processes through an organic greenhouse and PET recycling respectively. This will also give us the opportunity to learn from the land, attract the attention of other collectives and expand our capabilities for working with other community development projects through sharing experiences and exchanging the products of our hard work. The place we chose for this garden used to be used as a trash deposit, so we started cleaning it and making the soil fertile by adding compost to the lower layers, lots of work that we are sure will be worth every drop of sweat. We decided to take this ambitious project and we will be keeping you posted on the progress. For now, we have involved 14 people from around our neighborhood into preparing the land for planting. We are aiming at growing locally, getting our own produce in a sustainable and organic way, and getting to work with different people that will start being more aware of the environment and their own consumer habits and enjoying fresh vegetables on their tables all year round.