For the past six years, Fundación Corona has worked with residents of municipalities across Colombia to develop solutions to some of their most pressing social challenges. One of those ills is violence among and against youth. While it’s a scourge common to many disadvantaged communities around the world, it’s not too often that residents (including young people) are tasked with solving the problem.
That’s not true in Colombia, where Fundación Corona is deploying a method it calls the Territorial Dialogue Initiative (TDI), a forum that brings together multiple stakeholders to co-create public policy proposals. In this Q&A, Proximate talks to two of the NGO’s principals about how TDI works and how it is being used to prevent urban violence.
Diana Dajer is the NGO’s manager of citizen participation, and Manuela Giraldo serves as project lead for the project in Yumbo (an industrial hub in the west) and Buenaventura (a major port town on the Pacific coast).
Tell us about your goals with this initiative.
We’d already started working in these two communities, in 2019. There is a lack of legitimacy in Colombian public decision-making, due both to poor citizen engagement and a deficient government response to social challenges. As a result, the gap between people’s expectations and government actions keeps broadening. For example, there is much government corruption and political instability in Yumbo, with six mayors in four years!
We used the TDI process, which was introduced to us by the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, to bring together all of the parties we’ve been working with – including public officials, community influencers (such as leaders of youth organizations) and private enterprise owners – to identify and find solutions for the most pressing issues in their communities. There were about 40 participants in each municipality, and it was a two-month commitment.
How does the TDI work, and how did youth violence emerge as the most pressing issue in both municipalities?
There are so many issues! Participants were asked to identify their priorities, ordering them from 1 to 12. What surprised us was that in both places, violence – especially homicides – were identified as the top concern, but for different reasons.
Because Buenaventura is a port, a lot of illegal trade transits through it. That's why there are a lot of gangs competing for power there. But in Yumbo, it's more about small-scale drug dealing and social unrest such as protests, especially led by youth, due to poor quality of life. Yumbo had the second-highest homicide rate in Colombia in 2021, yet the municipality also ranked second in public security and justice investment. Clearly, current practices weren’t working.
Did you consider holding a citizens’ assembly to weigh in on the different policy proposals?
Citizens’ assemblies are getting a lot of buzz at the moment, because they are really good at creating equality among participants, and thus redistributing power. In fact, we are now exploring using an assembly to discuss the governance of technology in a municipality in Colombia called Barranquilla. We’re also considering organizing another one that would involve youth in looking at the mental health effects of social media. But it’s important to understand that different mechanisms should be used for different contexts and purposes. We didn't see it as the right fit for this initiative because we wanted to further develop our ties with stakeholders in the community.
In the United States, the first, kneejerk response to security issues like youth violence is to beef up law enforcement. But that is just treating the symptom, not the cause. How did you encourage a more thoughtful response?
After prioritizing the challenges, we asked participants to explore what factors promote the problem. Potential solutions had to be matched to the causes, not the problems themselves.
Participants were asked to identify three sub-agendas correlated with the main issue (violence). In Yumba, the sub-agendas identified were lack of access to education, a shortage of jobs that allow sufficient income (just 48% of workers earn at least the minimum wage) and the need for a more “protective” environment and a culture of peace. So, they quickly moved past the violence itself.
What comes after development of the policy proposals?
While both municipalities prioritized violence, they developed slightly different paths when it came to advocating for policy changes. In Yumbo, they agreed on a proposed policy that they brought to the municipality and then was later included in a broader policy to enhance quality of life for youth. In Buenaventura, participants’ proposals were used as the basis for a dialogue with candidates in local elections.
Last year, after the TDI, we created another stage to the process, called the Territorial Citizen Agenda, to allow participants to go further. It is like a strategic plan that they can advocate for with the general public as well as the government.
For example, for income generation, Yumbo participants created a vision for the municipality in which economic opportunities are available that allow a dignified life and a peaceful, equitable and inclusive society. To achieve this, they developed specific program ideas, such as employment training and job opportunities.
What about the funds required to implement this agenda? That’s usually a big barrier.
We're exploring the development of something that is called community philanthropy, a self-sustaining foundation created by citizens. Think of it as communal crowdfunding to resource the practices that people want to see implemented in their communities.
We're implementing it in partnership with an organization called TerritoriA, featured at the Shift the Power Summit in Colombia last year. I see it as a new type of participatory budgeting. Except we don’t want to be dependent on the city or other enterprises.
What lessons did you learn from this first run with TDI?
I’m not sure that Buenaventura was ready for a territorial dialogue; you need to have already built a strong base of trust and engagement before implementing this mechanism. We weren’t quite there.
It’s important to assess which organizations will be barriers vs enablers as part of a collective leadership. Choose wisely.
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