1. The project
This summer I set foot on a new continent for the first time after my first independent (and very long flight) from London, England to Medellin, Colombia in order to gain leadership experience in a Laidlaw central project organisation Picacho con Futuro (managed by make_sense Americas). Picacho con Futuro (dubbed simply 'Picacho' by our group), is located in Comuna Seis which requires a brilliant metro cable commute up the slope of the valley within which the city was built. Right away upon arrival, my beginner Spanish skills were being tested and became forcefully refined (not without some initial embarrassment which I had to quickly earn to get over) over the course of the project as we interacted with the community. The task was to design and outline a proposal for a cultural cafe (called 'Barrio Mio'; 'My Neighbourhood') that will be located at the Picacho Corporation and serves its members.
To do this, I utilised my training as a sociological researcher as we carried out focus groups and interviews in order to ascertain how the revitalised space could best incorporate and adapt to the ideas and challenges that exist at Picacho. Though I carried out interviews in my research project last summer, the fact that this work was tied so closely to a physical, visible, tangibly real outcome added a nuance to the way that we had to approach the sessions. Every person’s voice being heard was tantamount to the proposal being well accepted as we continued to develop it and ask for feedback, so we had to find ways of including everyone. For example, while the adults were happy to be very direct about what they wanted out of the cafe, we used more indirect methods with the child members of the organisation, such as drawing activities and incorporating other aspects of play.
Overall, I chose to work with Picacho because I believed that their mission aligned with my skills and interests and I am happy to say that I still believe that to be true. At every step, I was able to bring to the table my own ideas informed by my scholarly and work background, as well as less obvious aspects such as my interest in art and design which I used to create an explanatory pamphlet so that members of the organisation could best understand why and how we were creating Barrio Mio.
2. Becoming an ethical global citizen
Being in a new country, the differences in culture and daily life could be stark and at times challenging to adjust to. The expectations of interaction, time, food, and so much more were shifted and it was fascinating to explore the ways that I could incorporate some aspects of this culture back into my own life. However, it was also clear that some important beliefs were constant between locations. It is looking to both of these aspects that help to inform my development as an ethical global citizen.
For example, we found that looking at the UN Sustainable Development Goals was useful for ensuring that we stayed on track for our project, always informing the creation of our SMART goals. UN Sustainable Development Goal #11 Sustainable Cities and Communities for example shares clear aims in the work that we are hoping to achieve. In
Another shared aim to highlight is UN Sustainable Development Goal 12, Responsible Consumption and Production. As we visited other cultural cafes around the city, a key theme throughout was a focus on local ingredients, recipes, and flavours was to focus on local people and culture. Too many places are focused on the desires and tastes of tourists, we heard many people complain. For instance, Café Loma gave us a detailed introduction to coffee making, and how it is an important craft, especially in Colombia, which is known for this kind of production. We have learned through speaking with the groups under the Picacho organisation and especially from Adrian, its leader, that incorporating traditional foods is vital for the development of an inclusive and welcoming space for locals.
3. Finding myself as a leader
What does it mean to be a leader in a team of leaders? Is it possible to co-lead? These are some questions that I had coming into this LiA, as it is a central project that is unique from self-defined summers in that I am with a group of fellow Laidlaw scholars, not alone. Three other people made up my team: a Physicist from Leeds who graduated last month, a Biologist from Cornell in her first year, and an Urban Planning major from Tufts who, like me, graduates next year. I found quickly that we all had distinct ideas about how to approach our tasks, and I worried that we would struggle to find common ground. However, it was soon clear that our shared vision and objectives for the project overall outweighed any momentary disputes.
The learning process was made more structured by weekly leadership training sessions with the make_sense team: Daniela and Samantha. This gave us space as a cohort to be reflective and both appreciate what we had already achieved in our projects, as well as force us to consider how these insights might apply to our future work on it. It was also important by letting us interact more professionally with the other Laidlaw scholars in Colo,his who were assigned to different organisations. At times the external advice was fruitful and instructive for decisions that we made. For example, on the topic of prototyping, each team were tasked with presenting a mock-up of some deliverable aspect of our projects to the other teams, in order to receive applicable feedback. We created mock-ups for the pamphlet that I was designing and learned very quickly which designs worked best and why—all ideas that I would end up incorporating into my final design.
I was also able to draw on the leadership training that the Oxford Character project has equipped us Laidlaw scholars with. For example, I utilised my humility by recognising that a necessary prerequisite to this type of action is to listen more and learn about the specific past and current needs of the community that I hoped to serve. A tangible goal that I had and achieved early on was to understand what limited Picacho's attempts to develop commercial services in the past for example.
4. Overall…
Over the course of just a few weeks, a new President of Colombia was officially sworn into office, representing a significant shift in the political future of the country, and a tragic 7.4 magnitude earthquake (the first I have experienced in my life, coming from England) shook the nation. These events reminded me that, even a month into this trip, there was so much unfamiliar to me about this country. Each day, new people and places that I interacted with proved this to me in a more subtle way: there is so much to learn, and I can never stop thinking critically about the everyday if I want to understand how best to work in this environment and, better yet, serve it. Having now completed this project, I look back on this time as very hectic, yes, and fun, certainly, but most of all as an amazing way to have learned about an incredible country and its people while also being able to know them in a more intimate way than anywhere else that I’ve been: by working together, as a leader, but as an equal.