TAAP Foundation

For 11 years, we have been working with the Foundation, seeing the changes in the communities and how people's lives are entirely different when they decide to stop the violence. We have seen how mothers stop beating their children after being part of our workshops—we saw how those women learn to protect each other from abusive partners.
We have prevented hundreds of young people from choosing weapons and joining criminal gangs, allowing them to study and work where they love it. Today we have kids who were about to drop out of school to join micro drug trafficking gangs but who, thanks to TAAP's programs, decided to continue studying and today are artists, journalists, or engineers.
I dream of bringing this change to many more people, many more children, and young people. I dream of being able to help more victims of violence so that they can rebuild their lives. I dream of promoting public policies and massive campaigns so that people in Latin America understand how violence impoverishes us and how we can find different opportunities if we are creative and innovative.

I graduated in journalism and started working in events and PR for companies. Despite being a job that I loved, I didn't feel like that was the right thing to do.
One day I met a plastic artist who worked with very violent children, and it surprised me how through art, he managed to change the way of behaving and relating to others. That artist today is my husband, and together we created the foundation.
We both left our jobs to work at the foundation. We had a six-month-old daughter, and we felt it was our responsibility to reduce the violence that was increasing dramatically in our country.
We managed to serve thousands of people in the most violent and vulnerable communities in Venezuela. With the youth disarmament program, we provided opportunities for youth at risk of being recruited into gangs to leave those groups and work in creative industries.We reach hundreds of young people, and that bothered groups close to the government. We began to receive threats, and we had to leave the country with our two daughters.
In Bogotá, we re-founded TAAP so that from here, we could continue working in Venezuela, Colombia, and other countries.

Latin America is the region with the highest rate of violence in the world. According to UNICEF, more than 40 million children in the region suffer violence, abuse, and abandonment.Violence also affects women; according to the latest reported to the OIG, in 2019, there were 4,640 cases of femicide in the region, and one in every three women is a victim of abuse or violence.

These statistics reflect how violence is normalized in communities and affects people's capacity for development and well-being. We must add that criminal activities such as drug trafficking, killers, and belonging to criminal gangs are the most profitable option for thousand of people.

People and institutions, tend to have a set of beliefs and misconceptions about violence. Additionally, the Latin American educational system omits training in skills that develop healthy social habits and a culture of peace.

We developed the TAAP for training children, teenagers, parents, and teachers in peaceful living. The workshops help generate social development projects and ventures that improve the well-being of communities and even affect public policy. TAAP is changing the way people think by teaching dialogue for conflict resolution, mediation skills, and skills for protecting fundamental human rights. 

We first identify "detonators" of violence and then develops activities to deactivate them. The TAAP model comprises a learning process that leverages more than 100 activities, each designed to address equality, respect, diversity, bullying, tolerance, teamwork, etc. In the activities, participants observe, get to know themselves, and express their ideas freely. By sharing their views and seeing that each person is different, the individual learns to tolerate different ways of thinking and is encouraged to put himself/herself in another place to establish a dialog with others. 
Once the people in our programs recognize the patterns of violence, we provide them with tools to think about other alternatives to thrive. The TAAP method comprises three stages of learning: i) Observation, ii) Creation, and iii) Reflection / Action. It is a new teaching method that transcends the school environment and recognizes and fully develops the skills, interests, and potential creativity through visual arts. To the extent that the individual learns these skills, rather than rote practices as memorizing or copying, the individual begins to take time to understand their thought process. Experience with this learning model has allowed us to learn different approaches to decrease violence and its application in social contexts. 

TAAP has managed to consolidate itself as an organization that promotes peacebuilding and educational innovation in more than 15 countries worldwide. This has been possible thanks to the fact that we have a scale model through the training of organizations and allied teachers.

Our goal is to make the TAAP methodology available to all parents, teachers, and social organizations that want to build peace and create vehicles of collective impact for the benefit of their communities.
Today, more than 2.5 million people have benefited from our programs. More than 10 million have been part of the beneficiaries of the collective impact vehicles we are part of, and many more have benefited from the policies public that we have promoted.
We believe that a scale model that combines free access to information and training with collaborative projects, accompaniment, and the promotion of public policies for peacebuilding can be the way to reach more and more people throughout the world.