Think Creative - Issue 3

transforming towns together

At Outreach Centers like this one, volunteers serve as mentors for neighborhood youth.

Youth gather at their neighborhood Outreach

Center, a safe haven for them to spend their time off the streets and away from violence.

Safe spaces that help transform communities

On any given day, in Cojutepeque and munici- palities across the country, 166 neighborhood Outreach Centers are bustling. Kids, teens and young adults play pick-up soccer games, prac- tice their English skills, take life skills courses, rehearse routines with their dance clubs or just hang out. Some 32,000 youth attend these centers nationwide. What’s remarkable about these scenes? In many cases, before the arrival of the Outreach Center, or Centro de Alcance in Spanish, youth in these neighborhoods lacked a secure place to play, socialize after school and spend their time productively. The alternative is the streets, where futures are uncertain and violence is always a risk. As part of their participation in the centers, youth chart their dreams and goals for life and map out pathways to reach them, troubleshoot- ing with mentors to overcome obstacles along the way. Neighborhood volunteers, often young people themselves, keep the center’s activities alive. These Outreach Center volunteers are also key to project-supported and municipality-led public space recovery projects that have turned abandoned lots into soccer fields and desolate streets into colorful avenues for community markets and celebrations. To date, communities nationwide have inaugu- rated 64 such projects, and an additional 41 are in the works in eight municipalities. Magdalena Magaña, who leads the project’s public space

recovery initiatives across the country, says this large number of projects is a culmination of citywide collaborations. “In the end, we all work to create and generate the conditions and spaces for healthy recre- ation and to generate smiles in each of the kids of the community,” she says. She tells volunteers that although these proj- ects take hard work, they are worth it so the community’s youth, families and residents can reclaim part of their city and take pride in what they have built together. A skill, paycheck and path forward Meanwhile, as kids and youth spend free time at Outreach Centers and newly opened public parks, the project also helps to expand eco- nomic opportunity for young adults in these hard-hit areas. Jorge Jonathan Mendoza Ramos, 28, is one of them. On his first day of air conditioning repair class, he examines unknown tools, tubes and fluids that he will study and manipulate over the next several weeks. Unemployed and eager to start a business with friends, Mendoza enrolled in this course at Cojutepeque’s Municipal Vocational Training Center, known by its Spanish acro- nymFORMATE.

“[FORMATE] is not just a course, it’s something valuable that also helps make friendships and allows us to meet people from different fields and broaden our thinking.”

- Jorge Fuentes, 24, FORMATE workforce training graduate

18 | Think Creative | Summer 2018