IntegrArte

Colombia is the leading recipient of Venezuelan migrants. According to Migration Colombia 2022, the country hosts the most prominent refugees and migrants from Venezuela (2.48 million people) and observes diverse movement dynamics with transit and pendular populations.

Insufficient income required to meet basic needs due to high levels of unemployment and informality, coupled with rising commodity prices, means that the settled migrant population and Colombo-venezuelan returnees have unstable lives. 

The migrant' population in transit' is highly vulnerable: 92% do not have sufficient resources for their journey, and many people suffer from mental health problems. 

For the pendular population, the primary motivation for entering Colombia is access to medical treatment and medicines, and it consists mainly of women with children between the ages of 0 and 5. Many people cross the border through irregular crossing points, which exposes them to protection risks. 

Due to a lack of integration policies, many Venezuelans in Colombia, primarily children and youth, are vulnerable because they depend on daily income to survive and do not have support networks. 

According to Banco de la República, migrants have a higher level of education and are of highly productive age (between 15 and 30 years). However, despite being better trained to enter the labor market, they have lower incomes and higher rates of informality. This implies that a unique opportunity for migrants to contribute their knowledge and experience to benefit their host communities is being wasted.

In Colombia, the number of suicides among women and young migrants has increased steadily in recent times; authorities such as the Secretary of Health of Risaralda, the Secretary of Health of La Guajira, and the Mayor's Office of Medellin have warned about this situation. Consequently, they are asking for support to address the crisis. Of this figure, more than 40% are children and young people who not only face the anguish, scarcity, and instability with which their families live but also have no education or recreational spaces in the context of the crisis, which has also generated the appearance of depression and suicide at an early age.

The IntegrArte program seeks to strengthen families and organizations that serve the migrant population and host communities to create spaces for protection and support networks that allow the comprehensive development of migrant girls, boys, adolescents, and women and their integration into the host community—managing to prevent xenophobia and depression caused by migratory mourning.

The program includes a series of workshops and spaces for dialogue, as well as technological tools for data analysis and distributing necessary information among the migrant population.

Through the workshops and training in the use of technological platforms, the host communities, migrants, and leaders of grassroots organizations that work in support of the migrant population will receive tools for overcoming migratory grief and for the creation of citizen networks of accompaniment and protection; This will be complemented by a database analysis and targeting platform that will allow organizations to learn who are the most vulnerable migrants, which families have already received support and who require immediate attention. In this way, organizations can articulate their efforts to reach at-risk populations.

Through strengthening civil society organizations and leaders who work at the service of the migrant population, we seek to develop a social fabric in the host communities that generates mobilization actions and citizen participation for the integration of the migrant population, especially migrant girls and women.

The program includes training leaders in the host communities in managing migratory grief, in the culture of the primary migrant population in Colombia, the Venezuelan people, and in regulating refugees and migrant status.

In this way, the leaders of the host communities and the migrants themselves will be the ones who receive the new arrivals to help them in their integration.

In the second phase, the migrants who arrive in the communities will be registered in a database with 19,000 records. This database is then crossed on a digital platform that crosses the 19 information points of the person with the offers that can meet your needs.

For example, if one of the migrants is an automotive mechanic and nearby companies are looking for that profile, the platform will contact them and help the migrant prepare the requirements. The same applies to receiving information about their regularization processes and access to banking services.

To date, the TAAP Foundation has an alliance with a bank that opens accounts for the migrant population and even helps them to acquire credit for entrepreneurship.

The platform is based on the crossing of supply and demand and on monitoring the programs' beneficiaries to prevent opportunities and aid from always reaching the same people.

The basis of the program is the democratization of information and the empowerment of migrant and host communities so that they are the managers of their integration and well-being.

IntegrArte aims to serve all individuals and organizations involved in the ecosystem. With this solution, TAAP Foundation offers a systemic approach to the challenges we are working on, and that approach involves the entire ecosystem: individuals (migrants, host communities, community leaders), grassroots organizations, and government as those institutions that have the responsibility to serve the migrant population in a specific territory, in that precise order.

By giving tools and information to the different actors in the ecosystem, they have the opportunity to better understand each other and be able to choose the right way to interact and deal with all the challenges they have. Then, they will find and propose solutions to their own situations as a community and reduce violence to bring peace and sustainability to themselves.

Our founders are not only specialists in Communication for Development, pedagogy, and psychosocial support but also migrants; they were expelled from Venezuela in 2014 after receiving threats due to their work to promote the disarmament of young people in the most violent communities in Venezuela. Since then, they have been developing programs to support and receive Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and Latin America.

The project leader will be Gabriela Arenas de Meneses, TAAP’s co-founder, a Colombian-Venezuelan whose experience is focused on developing and implementing programs in peacebuilding, educational innovation, and migration in Venezuela, Colombia, and Latin America. 

The program team includes Carlos Eduardo Meneses, a Venezuelan migrant and visual artist. He is a co-founder of Fundación TAAP where he developed a learning methodology for peaceful coexistence through art. Carlos will be responsible for the creative development of the training materials and their adaptation to virtual environments.

The program will also feature María Eugenia Juárez as pedagogical coordinator, a Venezuelan migrant and passionate educator who has worked to improve education and articulation in the social sector in Venezuela and Colombia.

The Fundación TAAP team also has specialists in database management, programmers, and specialists in project development who will be responsible for expanding the platform. It already has the database and registration of the 19 data points of the first group of migrants and leaders.

IntegrArte is a program of great importance for the TAAP Foundation and its entire team. Being an organization made up of Colombian - Venezuelans, we understand the importance of integration in a migration process to achieve the well-being of migrants and their host communities.

We have applied to MIT Solve to expand our capacity and impact to benefit more people.

Our platform and the technological tools that will be developed for the program, thanks to the support of MIT Solve, will be able to benefit thousands of people in Latin America and then be scaled to all regions where refugee crises are experienced.

We aim to develop technological tools, pedagogical methodologies, and psychosocial care that can be open source after the region's initial implementation and impact evaluation.

The dialogue spaces and workshops included in the program promote empathy and create bridges between migrants and members of the host communities, allowing them to integrate and live in peace for their well-being and that of their families. These spaces are essential so a migrant does not lose the dignity, hope, and energy necessary to start a new life.

This first phase allows them to take advantage of the opportunities they can find on the platform and carry out the necessary processes to regulate their financial and labor integration.

In addition, training grassroots social organizations and host communities helps prevent xenophobia and other risks.

By having a holistic perspective of the challenges that each person or organization in the migration ecosystem must face, the program gives us a clear vision of the problems that arise in the host communities and the possible solutions for them.

In the next 24 months, our goal is to scale IntegrArte to host communities with a large number of migrants in Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. We will train more than 300 social organizations, which represent a minimum of 2,000 local leaders and 300,000 migrants receiving accompaniment and training directly through our programs and platforms, in addition to two million people sensitized in the prevention of xenophobia and migratory mourning through our educational materials and campaigns. 

Over the next five years, we expect to have our programs and methodology in place in the main migrant-receiving countries in the Region and to be able to show results to scaling to other continents.

The project will have a quantitative and qualitative measurement, through the first one we will measure the number of Venezuelan migrants reached by our programs, either through participation in online programs or through the download of free content. We will also measure other indicators such as the number of leaders of grassroots organizations that receive training, the number of virtual workshops delivered, and the number of psychosocial support consultations. 

Qualitatively, all elements of the program will be evaluated to learn how the training programs, materials, and content help migrants manage the challenges of life change and how this impacts their integration processes in their communities.

At TAAP Foundation we utilize creative methods and training to teach women, children, and youth new ways to tackle conflict, changing the narrative about conflict and trauma in the long term. 

Our theory of change affirms that we can construct a more peaceful future for the communities affected by violence through: 

• Helping the basic needs of the most vulnerable. For migrant and host communities, one of the most important needs is to learn how to handle their own situation, the ways to get information and tools to introduce themselves to the system in a new country, and how to understand migrants’ reality.

• Implementing workshops and training for migrants, host communities, and leaders so that they can tackle violence in the most peaceful way and have strategies and abilities to vision a more peaceful future

• Creating bigger communal ecosystems and advocating for measurable and high-impact peacebuilding programs at systematic levels.

To date, we have a platform for data management that allows the analysis of 19 data points; Ponder.ly developed this primarily to support the migrant population that would benefit from the foundation's programs.

Additionally, we have a targeting platform that allows us to cross-reference the data of the people benefiting from the programs and integration opportunities with new requests and needs.

Our team includes eleven women, ten men, and two people belonging to the LGBTIQ+ community.

Nine of our employees and collaborators are migrants, and six are Afro-descendant.

For the TAAP Foundation, it is essential to promote diversity in our teams because they allow us to integrate the perspectives of the beneficiary populations of our programs.

Since 2014, one of our main objectives has been the organization's and its programs' sustainability. For this, we carry out social consulting, research, conferences, mentoring, development of educational materials, and events on social development and well-being.

These initiatives allow us to raise 92% of the funds required for our annual operation.

We have received Grants from organizations like the Schwab Foundation and Rotary International and international cooperators such as the Embassy of Poland, the Embassy of France, and The International Agency for Spanish Cooperation—donations from private companies such as Direct TV and natural persons such as the singer Goyo.

In addition, we raised more than 500 thousand USD through events and collaborations in the last three years.

And products such as the book "The Perfect Imperfect Girl" have raised more than 100 thousand USD for the foundation between the book's sale and the holding of conferences associated with it.