The First Urban Memory Cultural Center of Manizales/Colombia will embrace the diverse practices, knowledge, and daily experiences of our Solferino neighborhood and Communes 5 and 12. It will be a space for social inclusion, strengthening neighborhood identity, memory, social bonds, and local capacities.Faced with low access to higher education, school dropout, high psychoactive substance use, social stigmatization, unemployment, and scarce institutional opportunities, our youth and adults live in an environment with limited chances for personal growth.The Cultural Center seeks to create an innovative space for popular and playful education, benefiting more than 18,000 residents — especially children, youth, and women — in one of the city's most youthful communes. It aims to transform the perception of the territory by promoting citizenship, empowerment, and a strong sense of belonging through cultural, educational, and social activities that value local knowledge, support human rights, and encourage peacebuilding.The Center aspires to involve over 10,000 people in its early years, including families, children, young people, and social leaders, through workshops, cultural gatherings, and intergenerational dialogues. It will become an open-access space, a meeting point to dream, create, and transform the community’s future together.

The First Urban Memory Cultural Center of Manizales/Colombia will be created in the Solferino Neighborhood and Communes 5 and 12, with the goal of becoming a space for social inclusion. Its purpose is to strengthen neighborhood identity, collective memory, social fabric, and the development of capacities in a community facing challenges such as low access to higher education, school dropout, psychoactive substance use, social stigmatization, and unemployment. These issues, combined with limited institutional support, create an environment with few opportunities for the comprehensive development of youth and adults.

The Cultural Center aims to promote an innovative space for popular and playful education, benefiting more than 18,000 people, with a focus on youth and children. The initiative seeks to transform the perception of the territory by fostering citizenship building, the empowerment of youth, women, and children, and the recovery of a sense of belonging. Through workshops, cultural gatherings, and social activities, it will promote the defense of human rights and the construction of peace.

The project will engage over 10,000 people in its first years, including social leaders, families, children, and youth in training activities, job skills workshops, and intergenerational dialogue spaces. Its impact will be reflected in the creation of an open-access space that serves as a platform for dreaming and collectively transforming the community’s future.

The team leading the construction, where our desires for transformation, our indignations, and the courage to pave new paths, learned and shared over the past 5 years, converge. We are a team of rebellious young people from different professions who have sought escape spaces to commit to defending our community and building peace. Interdisciplinarily, we are committed to building this dream. Kevin in structural design, Felipe in strategic alliances with institutions, Roy in pedagogy and audiovisual media, Luis in law, and Estefania in writing and mediation. All of us, with our skills and capabilities, are committed to life, dreams, and the materialization of this project

Kevin López Rodriguez
Architect from the National University of Colombia, active member of the Huellas de Vida Community Foundation, and co-architectural designer of the project

Andres Felipe Marin
Social Worker from the University of Caldas, Specialist in Critical Pedagogy from the Latin American Center for Critical Thinking in Mexico and UCM, Social Manager, and Leader

Roy Alexander Coca Castrillón
Information Systems Technician from UAM, Family Development student (10th semester) at the University of Caldas, coterminal Master's student in Social Justice and Peacebuilding, Communications Manager, and Social Leader

Estefania Franco Castiblanco
Social Work student at the University of Caldas, intern at the Huellas de Vida Community Foundation

Luis Tellez
Law student at the University of Caldas, student leader, precursor of the Popular Pre-College University in Quindío, and Legal Advisor

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