With a diverse team, joint by the vision of a country in which the generations that follow us are not sacrificed by a war in which we have not chosen to fight, a hope that the guns and the violence are not our way of dialogue, a dream of finding ways to transform the conflict and to think of possibilities that allow in the challenges of everyday life not to find personal attacks, but ways in which we can evolve together.
This whole exercise also responds to a larger question we rarely hear posed in the social sector: Can we work together on a subject we are passionate about, beyond the organizational egos? How difficult is it to let go of the “I created this” and change it to “we created this”? Our intuition was that yes, we could do it, but the road would not be easy.
We had held workshops in many places, but if one of them was our favorite, the conclusion was not long in coming: The street. It is the democratic space par excellence, where no one is excluded, where everyone can participate and, where traditionally, the most significant changes in societies have taken place through protests, proposals, and revolutions that have reshaped the balance of power and access to rights in society.
To achieve our goal, we made an exercise of joint co-creation in which the question was asked: How do you imagine a country in peace? In a period of one hour, more than 50 people participated leaving their contribution using markers and paint. We think it is a relevant exercise for two main reasons. In the first instance, it is a way of reactivating the dialogue around the peace issue that had been lost during this administration. In the second instance, painting on a piece of paper on the wall symbolically represents that appropriation of public space and just as each citizen has the possibility of being in decision-making spaces, where their contribution is taken into account by others and counts to build a joint proposal of the country we want.
