PASO Colombia joins Voices from the Territory, a project in which we will work alongside communities in 40 PDET municipalities to collaboratively formulate communication projects on their peace-building experiences, using diverse expressions of art, media, and culture.
The experience that PASO Colombia has developed by working with productive projects in conflict zones will be used to promote communication and cultural initiatives in 40 municipalities prioritized in the Development Plans with a Territorial Approach (PDET as per its acronym in Spanish), which emerged as part of the implementation of the Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace.
As part of the Voices from the Territory project, PASO will work alongside 4,000 women, youths, members of ethnic communities, ex-combatants, and the LGBTIQ+ population in developing communication and cultural initiatives to narrate their experiences in peacebuilding. The project began its first phase in mid-2021. It is led by the Colombian Peace Fund, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and is financed by the United Nations Multi-Donor Fund.
The project’s objective is to promote co-responsibility in the implementation of the Peace Agreement through extensive, informed and inclusive participation. PASO supports the second phase of Voices of the Territory by providing methodologies and guidance for communities to collectively formulate projects based on peace narratives, leveraging the resources they already have, building upon their own resilience and peacebuilding trajectory through cultural production, and enhancing it with the resources provided by the project.
In this way, communication collectives, community radio stations, productive associations and cultural collectives will be able to recognize their communicative potential, and then formulate and execute a wide range of collaborative projects. Based on these, they will narrate how they are contributing to building peace and how they are betting on reconciliation through dance, recovery of memories, tourism, graffiti, radio and audiovisual production, while consolidating life projects where youth and diverse populations especially affected by the armed conflict will be their protagonists.
To this end, PASO has deployed a team of extensionists in the 40 municipalities, who will lead workshops on strategic project formulation, accompany the communities and their leaders through this formulation, facilitate dialogue with journalists and local media outlets to generate mutually beneficial agreements between the media and the projects, and host workshops to strengthen the capacities required by each initiative. In Phase 3 of Voices from the Territory, the Colombian Peace Fund will provide supplies and funding to further develop these projects.
Consequently, enriching the work model developed by working with agricultural enterprises of ex-combatants, victims of armed conflict, families who have left illicit crops behind and Venezuelan migrants, PASO will have the opportunity to continue contributing to peace building by amplifying the voices of diverse populations in territories most affected by the conflict in the country.
Find Voices from the Territory on social media: