E-Motive event in Spain! 

Social change from the community and based in community communication

This first year of implementation of E-Motive in Spain has resulted in two successful exchanges between Barcelona (Altekio and other community representatives) and Santos (Instituto Elos), and Cordoba (La Trama ComunicAcción) and Buenos Aires (FM La Tribu). The two methodologies focus mainly on both community building as well as new forms of democracy and citizen participation.

Keeping exchanges multidimensional and open

One of the main learning points from the previous years of experience in The Netherlands is that exchanges, when kept bilateral, tend to focus only on one issue. This means that their reach is limited and there isn’t any space for cross pollination of methodologies, expertises, approaches, etc.Bearing this in mind, the exchanges in Spain were planned and designed to have space for exchange also with other local experiences and have mixed groups take part in all the possible activities. This is the reason why on the 4th of December this “experiment” of crisscrossing both experiences and sharing it with a broader group was launched.

Community and communication

The goals of this event were to enable sharing and learning from the two exchange experiences directly from their participants; explore the different models of leadership for change in agents of change; the sense of “community” and the added value of both methodologies for deep systemic change.Some questions were posed to the participants in order to defy their own concepts and paradigms: the idea of rethinking and redefining concepts, stereotypes and breaking down walls that prevented collaboration of different type of actors was present throughout the meeting.One of the most interesting parts of it was the connection established even between the two “foreign” methodologies, which did not exist before, creating a sense of multi-actor, multi-level, multi-intensity connection and networking.

Next steps

This experiment was only the first to take place. The understanding is that the agents of change who are actively taking part in the E-Motive activities and exchanges will be able to share the experience with other stakeholders and build a network of practice, a community, around the philosophy of E-Motive.There will be written material available with the main conclusions of the event soon! Be patient and come back to explore with us!