#MEET Embodying Reconciliation
This is a short interview we conducted with Diana T. Gutiérrez and Signa Schiavo-Campo, the founders of “Embodying Reconciliation”. If you like the concept of this idea and would like to vote for it, click HERE.
We are Diana T. Gutiérrez (Colombia) and Signa Schiavo-Campo (Italia). We are 30 and 27 years old, and we are currently living in Colombia. We are dancers, anthropologists, artists and educators, and we are the co-founders of a young enterprise called Embodying Reconciliation for bringing social change through arts, culture and bodily practice in communities afflicted by conflict and war around the world.
- Describe your idea or project in two sentences.
Embodying Reconciliation inspires processes of transformation and alternative paths toward reconciliation through artistic, bodily, and cultural practices in (post-) conflict situations.
- What are the benefits you take from the Entrepreneurship Campus?
The Entrepreneurship Campus offers very useful online training courses that can help us to develop the potentialities of our project and to make it more grounded. Moreover, the platform is a great opportunity to make our initiative more visible at an international level and to get in touch with other young entrepreneurs, to get to know and to learn from each other’s ideas and projects. Furthermore, the acknowledgement given by the participation to the Young Citizenship Entrepreneurship Competition can inspire others to join the initiative and to benefit more people and communities around the world. the world, sponsorship and mentorship.
- What motivates you to be an entrepreneur?
We wish to integrate our life passions for arts and humanities as a way to build social change by creating opportunities for other people and communities to follow their artistic vocation. We open spaces of intercultural encounter, we are building a platform for make visible cultural initiatives and cultural practices that otherwise would remain unseen. Our motivation for entrepreneurship is born from a deep desire to open alternative ways for reconciliation and conflict resolution through arts and culture. We dream to become a model in peace building processes that could inspire others to get involved in similar social actions.
- Imagine you have ‚supreme power’ to create and innovate: how would your world look like? What changes would you like to make in your community and/or in the world? Share your thoughts from a ‚supreme power’ and entrepreneur standpoint.
Our world would be based in cooperation and mutual support, so that everyone could have the chance to follow her or his vocation and human creativity would have a place in people’s lives, as the basic needs of survival would be taken care for. Arts and culture would be fully accessible to everyone and would be experienced as powerful ways to open life paths, to foster transformation processes and to rebuild social bonds. We wish to create sustainable cycles that allow communities to reconnect with and take care of their territory and local practices, we wish to awaken joy and to foster the wellbeing among people peacefully coexisting together.
- What would you say to potential voters who may be reading your interview?
Please help us by voting our project, you will make possible to give great visibility and support to our initiative and spread in more and more communities. Join us in building trust by supporting arts, dance and local cultures, and sowing seeds of peace in your community and in the world around us.
• NOTICE: If you want to see more submitted ideas and projects at the Youth Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition, visit BEST IDEAS and BEST PROJECTS and VOTE for the ones you think deserve to WIN the Competition!
