The InspirAcción Challenge

How it works?

The Challenge

In July 2018, we opened a call for proposals. What we wanted was to help inspired people generate change through education, but we also wanted the seeds of that change to come from themselves. The InspirAcción Challenge received ideas from the communities of some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Forming teams, they submitted projects for grassroots social enterprises focused on early-childhood education, family education and education towards gender equality.

The Selection Process

The InspirAcción foundation teamed up with a group of university professors, social organizations and education professionals for a first step of the selection process. We were looking for motivated citizens with plenty of potential: the candidates’ ideas were evaluated on their viability, their creativity and the motivation of their team. In that way, our jury selected three finalist projects that went on to attend workshops with our team in Cartagena to refine and polish their ideas. Once our three star-teams had their projects ready, we wanted the last step of the selection process to center the communities. The teams went out to their neighborhoods, knocking on doors and asking for support. More than 415 people cast their vote online during the month of October, and that’s how our winning team was defined.

The Winners

The winning project of 2018 is called Creando Igualdad, spanish for “Creating Equality”. By providing arts workshops to young people in their neighbourhood, the team wishes to introduce them to notions of gender equality. Through creative activities such as theater, plastic arts and music, children and teens will create a sense of community and fight the prevalence of gender discrimination and violence in their area. Read more about them here!

Our grassroot teams

We are currently working with a motivated team of young social entrepreneurs. Our winning team is starting a project called Creating Equality, with a focus on gender equality and preventing gender violence. With the help of the InspirAcción Foundation and its partners, they are planning to provide weekly classes of music, arts and theater to one hundred children and teenagers in their community. These creative workshops will focus their production on issues of gender equality, emphasizing the importance of empathy and respect, stimulating interpersonal communication skills and emotional intelligence and debating ideas of gender roles. By participating in these classes, young people will have access to new means of personal expression, fortify their sense of community and fight the cycles that reproduce gender discrimination and violence in their area.