In March of this year, the Mesoamerican Leadership School took another step in consolidating its work in Panama by incorporating two facilitators from the Assudub and Manssugum communities of the Guna Yala Comarca, Panama’s Caribbean coast, into the team.
Yanisbeth González and Alcibiades Rodriguez underwent their induction process during the past month. Gonzalez is 26 years old and is part of the Assudub community; Rodriguez, 28 years old, comes from the Manssugum community.
Both highlight the School’s contribution to the creation of a space for the empowerment of the region’s young population. For González, the Mesoamerican Leadership School is “the space given to the youth to strengthen our leadership and develop the capacities we have individually and collectively, in which we can keep in mind our culture and philosophy as Gunadule¨ Nation and People.
While for Alcibiades Rodríguez the School is a platform to connect the new generations of youth and thus strengthen the work in the communities.
Since 2017, the School has worked on training young people as leaders with human values, who contribute to face the challenges and needs of their communities. The training process seeks to strengthen the capacities of young people, it is a “school without walls” because it goes from one country to another, from one reality to another, from experience to experience.
Its main interest is to encourage the participation of more young people who contribute in determining future challenges and ensure that they play an important role in the work to obtain better results.
New facilitators
Yanisbeth González assures that her main objective is to support the Comarca Guna Yala and the youth. She also comments that one of her wishes is that participation is equitable.
“The youth is a fundamental part of the solutions to the problems we have, in which I hope to be able to contribute and continue together with the school to form more leaders who will continue and fight for the conservation of our culture in the future,” says Gonzalez.
Photo: Naypiler Hackin
González has been involved in community organizations since she was a child. She was the first representative of the Guna General Congress in the Coordinating Committee of Territorial Women Leaders of Mesoamerica. She also represented youth in the Guna General Congress and the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (AMPB) on climate and youth agendas.
Currently, González is part of the First General Youth Congress as an advisor to the youth in the congresses held in the Guna Yala region.
For his part, Alcibiades Rodriguez, since 2018, was interested in showing the historical trajectory, struggles, and reality of Gunadule, so he trained in audiovisual production. This work in communication led him to learn to use drones for field monitoring systems.
Photo: Yaily Castillo
120 young people are part of the School
To date, the Mesoamerican Leadership School has more than 120 young people from different community forestry organizations in Petén (Guatemala) and 80 young Miskitos (Honduras).
The School has trained 400 young leaders in grassroots processes and organized three international events. Its objective is to continue expanding in the Mesoamerican region and position the voice of indigenous youth in different spaces and levels of advocacy.
According to the director of the Mesoamerican School, Marcial López, one of the main goals of the current work with young people is to develop a local proactive capacity to address climate change and strengthen the governance of forest management and the defense of biodiversity.
López mentions that the expectation with the entry of the new facilitators from Panama is to “strengthen the Youth Congress of the Guna Yala people as a space for participation of indigenous youth from a gender perspective and strong community participation in decision making”.
The director believes that an innovative youth training program should be developed, appropriate to the conditions of the Guna people, to strengthen leadership and cultural identity for the defense of the territory and indigenous autonomy.
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