Youth Animation Center, 45 years strengthening citizen exercise

For 45 years, the Youth Animation Center (CAJ) has been dedicated to training and accompanying communities with the aim of empowering citizens on issues of enforceability and defense of human rights, community education with Christian values ​​and resilience, among other areas. that seek to improve the quality of life of citizens.

Currently, this NGO develops projects such as La Gente Propone and Participación y Protagonismo Ciudadano that are applied in different sectors of the city of Valera, whose objective is to organize the communities most affected by the deficiencies of public services and the complex humanitarian crisis, and thus be able to demand from government agencies solutions to these problems.

The Community Network of Rights and Citizenship was born from this same need of the people to face the deficiencies of the public policies of the Valera municipality, that is why the community monitors and animators of the different sectors of the city have organized themselves to form this network as a space for the training, organization and empowerment of citizens.

national projects

The Citizen Observatory of Municipal Public Policies La Gente Propone is a project that is currently being developed in 14 municipalities in the country with the support of the Youth Animation Center and the Cesap Social Group. Its main objective is to make visible the performance of the public services of each municipality and seek the organization of citizens in order to demand a solution from the organizations that provide said services and at the same time generate proposals for their improvement. These proposals are generated by the citizens themselves.

“The The greatest achievement of this project has been the commitment and dedication that people have had in seeking solutions to the problems of their communities through formal complaints, delivery of letters, banners, forums, citizen assemblies among other enforceability mechanisms that have shown that we Valerans are not left with conformism and criticism. If we want a better quality of life with efficient public services, we must demand them and propose solutions”, maintains Otilia Paredes, Coordinator of the project in the Valera municipality, who has shared the experience of the community overseers.

For his part, Antonio Perdono, also a member of the NGO, maintains that the Project for Citizen Participation and Protagobnismo promoted by the CAJ seeks to empower people in their condition as citizens through reflection-critical training processes of practice.

“These projects favor natural leadership to improve skills and actions that they develop. This project supports socio-productive undertakings in the context of the complex humanitarian emergency, for this there is a whole accompaniment, advice, and there are already 60 quite satisfactory experiences, all of this is articulated with the local organization for community development, leave the mentality that everyone has to give them to us, and on the contrary it is the community itself that takes initiatives and develops projects for its benefit and improvement, they do not remain in the complaint, but they venture to undertake actions for the exercise of their citizenship”.

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For: Alexander González

IG: @AlexGonzalezDigital

Photos: Courtesy