Colombia Cuida Colombia (CCC) is a national COVID response movement of over 400 organizations across civil society and the private sector. It launched in March 2020 to mobilize a coordinated response to the pandemic’s impacts on food security, health, education, and income generation. In 2020, the collaborative raised over $2 million from 55,000 individuals and organizations and garnered an additional $30 million in in-kind support.
What began as a WhatsApp group has since evolved into a national movement that activates the public to work together towards a more just and inclusive society.
“2020 was a year in which social entrepreneurs had to learn to accelerate the value of collaboration to generate more impact and be able to support the millions of people affected by the pandemic,” said Gabriela Arenas, Director of TAAP Foundation and leader of the Latin America chapter of Catalyst 2030. “For me, CCC has been one of the most important global examples in this regard.”
In 2020, CCC provided monthly food donations to over 1.8 million people, supported 200,000 Colombians in gaining better access to education, provided 45,000 health professionals with improved biosafety equipment, and supported 30 startups through its income generation initiative Reactiva Colombia.
Juliana Uribe Villegas and Maria Jose Rubio are promoters of CCC, and both are veterans of the social sector. Uribe Villegas is the Founder and Executive Director of Movilizatorio, a citizen engagement and social innovation lab that strengthens collective leadership as an engine for transformation in Colombia and across Latin America. Rubio has 25 years of experience in the social sector and recently founded Toynovo, a social enterprise with a circular economy model that promotes learning through play, reduces waste, and generates better education opportunities for all. Mariana Diaz is the Head of Partnerships & Institutional Director at Movilizatorio.
Constanza Gómez is CCC’s newly appointed Executive Director. She brings to the role 26 years of experience developing public policies and social projects serving children, youth, and vulnerable populations, and developing cross-sector alliances to improve the quality of life of the Colombian population.
Kathryn Spencer: What was the origin story of this collaborative, and how is CCC responding to the COVID crisis?
Juliana Uribe Villegas: We are a citizen engagement and social innovation lab that started in Colombia, but we also work across different countries in Latin America. What we wanted to do was create an alliance that will also be a movement in which many organizations, citizens, and companies could participate to respond to the COVID crisis.
Maria Jose Rubio: After many years in the social sector, it became very clear that a collective impact approach was the answer to generating sustainable progress in social issues. When the pandemic started, my husband and I gathered a group of colleagues from the social and private sectors to build a network that could work together to develop solutions for what we could see was going to be a long and profound crisis generated by COVID. So, we started a WhatsApp group, and Juliana was one of the first people invited. This is how CCC started.
Kathryn: What gaps are you filling? Why the need for this collaborative?
Juliana: I think in the middle of the pandemic we as citizens didn’t really know what we could do to add to a solution, and what’s very interesting about CCC is that it opens a door for citizens to engage in part of the solution. Of course, there were local governments providing support, but on the civil society part, we became like that one shop place.
And that was a big gap that needed to be filled because there are existing networks of organizations but many of these networks are among similar organizations. We met with organizations that are very different from us, or different from each other, and I think that provides a lot of value because that breaks the silos. It builds new trust. It starts new collaborations, new conversations, and yes, basically, it’s a way to get out of the comfort zone and work in different ways.
Constanza: Although CCC was born as an articulated response to COVID, it opens a great opportunity to consolidate, strengthen, and diversify high-impact initiatives in the country that add value to many social problems that require coordinated work between the private sector, NGOs, communities, the public sector, and civil society. The pandemic is here to stay for a while and its impact on social, environmental, and economic development will remain. For this reason it is necessary to think about long-term creative solutions.
Kathryn: CCC is comprised of over 400 organizations, with 55,000 individual financial contributors. It’s really a response effort “of the people.” What are the big barriers or challenges in mobilization and citizen engagement? What stands in the way of progress?
Juliana: I think the challenge is to keep the movement alive and cohesive, and to keep common goals. It was very easy to have a common goal in such a unique emergency in which all of us were involved in all the regions, but when the strict quarantine ended, many of the organizations have to go back to their usual work. One of the big things is after all the noise, to actually be able to gain the trust of the people by showing results of what we did with the donations we got, or what we’re going to do in the future.
Constanza: One of the great challenges is to achieve the transition from an organic model that came up as a humanitarian emergency response to the pandemic, to a sustainable model of collective impact that identifies, prioritizes, and responds with transparency to the problems of the most vulnerable communities and territories of the country. To coordinate and enhance the capacities and strengths of the different public, private, social, community, academic, and international partners around creative solutions to provide comprehensive responses to social problems.
Kathryn: What about your collaboration with government actors? What have you learned about civil society’s ability to fill gaps left by government-led response efforts?
Maria Jose: In working with the government, we have a lot of learnings, a lot. CCC has been working on the emergency, but also thinking and reflecting on how we can play a role to build a better co-construction process to solve social problems. What we’ve been doing is helping to articulate offer and demand, from the point of view of the government, the companies, the local community, and the foundations.
CCC has occupied a place as civil society to fill in the gaps and help all the actors co-construct a better tomorrow. We’re building strong relationships between civil society organizations and governmental technical teams to solve the problems in the territories as a way of really producing results for the common good. Also, whenever needed, we meet with the Presidency, or the Ministers to advocate for better solutions.
Kathryn: You’re currently undergoing a transition from rapid response mode to longer-term strategic planning, including formalizing CCC’s governance and strategy. Can you tell us about that process, and what success looks like for CCC in the long-term?
Constanza: It is necessary to build with partners, allies, citizens, and communities a common purpose for CCC, which goes beyond the emergency humanitarian response to the pandemic and allows not only to provide innovative responses to the problems of the territories, but consolidates us as a vehicle of collective impact. CCC becomes a space that makes it possible for any ally or volunteer who joins this initiative to serve the transformation of the country.
Mariana: I think the massive effort is how to mobilize, how to engage citizens to actually believe they’re doing something more than just donating, and actually building something and being part of something. That is also part of how we create a movement, how you can create that ownership, how you can make citizens feel they’re a key player.
Even though this sounds obvious, in our experience, it’s so important to change that mindset of citizens to actually turn on that little power button on these engines of change within themselves.
One of the main facts of how we planned CCC was to generate social tissue that transcended the crisis. How do we make the Colombian society actually mobilize and be engaged in a much deeper way, and not only in assistance or philanthropy, but more like a social transformation that generates social tissue?
Juliana: I think the situation here in Colombia is similar to the one in the US in terms of political polarization. CCC has been one vehicle to unite a lot of people through causes that are common to all of us and that are not polarized. I think it’s been very nice to see organizations and people coming together and working together for something bigger than the organizations, but also regardless of if things divide us, right?
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