Columbia International Affairs Online: Journals

CIAO DATE: 04/2014

Fighting for Aboriginal women — Promoting literature for social change — Defending undocumented immigrants — Connecting investors to social impact.

Americas Quarterly

A publication of:
Council of the Americas

Volume: 0, Issue: 0 (Spring 2013)


Abstract

Some of our hemisphere's emerging leaders in politics, business, civil society, and the arts. In this issue: Politics Innovator: Michèle Audette, Canada Arts Innovator: Mauricio Díaz Calderón, Colombia Civic Innovator: Tania Mattos, Bolivia/United States Business Innovator: Instiglio, United States

Full Text

Some of our hemisphere's emerging leaders in politics, business, civil society, and the arts. In this issue: Politics Innovator: Michèle Audette, Canada Arts Innovator: Mauricio Díaz Calderón, Colombia Civic Innovator: Tania Mattos, Bolivia/United States Business Innovator: Instiglio, United States Invisible no more: Michèle Audette advocates for the nearly 600 missing or murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Photo: Fred Chartrand/Getty Politics Innovator: Michèle Audette, Canada Michèle Audette, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), knows what it means to be invisible. Although she is a native Innu speaker, born in the Innu community of Mani Utenam in Québec, Audette was not granted Indigenous status when she was born because her mother had married a non-Native. At the time, Canada’s Indian Act—portions of which were repealed in 1985—removed official Aboriginal status not only from those who married non-Aboriginals, but from their children as well. Perhaps the only notable achievement of the law was that it sparked an activist career that transformed Audette from an “invisible” young woman into one of Canada’s most high-profile Indigenous leaders. Audette was just 16 when she volunteered at the Native Friendship Centre of Montreal (NFCM) to work for justice for Canada’s First Nations women. Now 41 and the mother of five, her commitment to Aboriginal rights has taken her from grassroots activism to the halls of power. By 1998, at the age of 27, she was elected one of the youngest presidents of Québec Native Women (QNW), one of NWAC’s 13 member organizations. Between 2004 and 2009, she served as deputy minister in the provincial Secretariat of the Status of Women under then-Québec Premier Jean Charest. After her stint in government, she returned to nonprofit work and in 2012 was elected president of NWAC. Along the way, Audette gathered a string of honors and national recognitions for her work, including the Québec YWCA’s Femme de Mérite (Woman of Distinction) award. But the honors are not what Audette considers her greatest achievement. In 2010, galvanized by the fact that her oldest son had still not been granted Aboriginal status under Canadian law because Audette’s mother did not register herself as Native in 1985, Audette organized a 500-kilometer (311-mile) march from Wendake, Québec to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario to protest the government’s treatment of Indigenous women and their children. She believes that, in part because of the march, the heritage of her son and 45,000 other Canadians was finally recognized the following year, when a new amendment to the Indian Act granted Aboriginal status to the descendants of women who had married non-Indigenous men. Audette’s next goal was just as ambitious. Under her auspices, NWAC launched a campaign to help the families of murdered or missing Indigenous Canadian women. Through a five-year social media campaign, NWAC identified at least 582 women who had disappeared or been killed since 2008, estimating that as many as 2,000 women have been victimized over the past 30 years. Audette blames racism for the deaths. She recalls the case of a woman who was abducted, raped, beaten, and left for dead in a ditch in December: “When she met with the police, the woman told them, ‘Those men told me that I wasn’t the first Aboriginal woman to be raped or beaten, and I won’t be the last one.’” During 2012, NWAC led 180 vigils for the families of the victims that attracted world attention. In collaboration with NWAC, the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an online public database of missing persons and unidentified remains. Indigenous advocates worry that because the database does not track ethnicity, the number of Aboriginal women who have been murdered or disappeared will be lost in the larger picture of murdered Canadian women. According to Statistics Canada, Aboriginal Canadian women are 3.5 percent more likely to be attacked by a stranger than other Canadian women. Audette doesn’t know what her next campaign will be, but she says the motivating force hasn’t changed from the days when she was an angry young activist. “The biggest challenge,” says Audette, “is reminding the federal government it has a legal responsibility toward Aboriginal people.” Back to top Arts Innovator: Mauricio Díaz Calderón, Colombia Mauricio Díaz, a 26-year-old Colombian journalist currently studying for a Masters in cultural studies at the Universidad de los Andes, has transformed his passion for literature into a means of achieving social change. Fundación Fahrenheit 451, the brainchild of Díaz and a group of college students with a common passion for literature, started in 2007 as a nonprofit organization based in Bogotá that uses literature to promote the social inclusion of underserved populations. But the founders soon realized that they needed a literary vehicle of their own. The result: a literary magazine with the same name—Fahrenheit 451—that has become one of Colombia’s most intriguing publications. Both the foundation and the magazine are tongue-in-cheek appropriations of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel that imagines a society in which books are outlawed, even burned, by authorities. Like Díaz, who oversees the foundation’s projects, magazine director Javier Osuna, 26, and editor Sergio Gama, 28, maintain that the progress of society depends on the cultivation of the mind—and that means introducing the pleasures of reading to as many people as possible, including those who don’t have easy access to literature. They call it the “democratization of words.” Fahrenheit 451 carries the work of emerging local writers and poets as well as international stars such as Sonia Nazario and Ryszard Kapuscinski. The magazine is freely distributed during the annual Literature Festival in Bogotá, when public spaces throughout the city host a series of storytelling workshops, poetry readings and cultural activities. The festival’s activities are free, and they have attracted over 8,000 people since debuting in 2010. The festival and magazine are vehicles for Fahrenheit 451’s principal aim: promoting social change in Colombia. The foundation works with vulnerable youth in Bogotá by presenting literature as an alternative to drugs, gangs and violence. Through its Proyecto Despertar (Project Awakening) it has also helped more than 70 people with cognitive disabilities develop literary and artistic skills. In partnership with Fundación Saldarriaga Concha, an organization that supports initiatives for older adults and people with disabilities, Fahrenheit 451 reaches more than 2,000 seniors in cities like Medellín, Cartagena and Cali by inviting them to write their stories and narrate their life experiences as a means of preserving the communities’ cultural identity. Fahrenheit 451’s successful model of social inclusion is grant-driven. It has earned the support of the Colombian Ministry of Culture, a large network of volunteers, and local libraries, theaters, schools, and museums that have partnered with Fahrenheit 451 to produce the festival and implement the foundation’s many social programs. In 2012, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) recognized Díaz as a “Young Change Agent” for promoting social innovation in Colombia. The foundation’s success has enabled its founders to reach out to communities with little access to the cultural riches available in major cities. One project under way focuses on the southwestern department of Caquetá and targets older adults who were victims of violence. Yet Díaz has found it hard to win the same support from the private sector. More visible or audience-friendly cultural activities like theater and dance get more attention than literature. He believes that the need for more cultural investment is a common challenge across Latin America, but literature is the hardest to sell. “There’s only so much we can do,” he says. “People have to appropriate the spaces we have created for them to share their stories and ideas. Only then will they be able to fully realize the potential of literature to achieve social inclusion and preserve their cultural identity.” Back to top Civic Innovator: Tania Mattos, Bolivia/United States Click here to view a video interview with Tania Mattos. Tania Mattos was watching Telemundo with her mother one day in May 2010 when she witnessed something that changed her life. On screen, four young undocumented immigrants dressed in graduation caps and gowns were being arrested during a sit-in at Arizona Republican Senator John McCain’s office in Tucson. Their fearlessness resonated with Mattos, an undocumented immigrant who left Bolivia at age four and moved with her mother and brother to Queens, New York to reunite with her father. “That was the first time in my life that I ever saw anybody say they were undocumented on TV,” Mattos, 29, recalls. After years of living in the shadows while friends and classmates earned their drivers’ licenses, got jobs and college scholarships, and pursued paths that were otherwise closed to her because of her status, Mattos decided to do the thing that was most terrifying for a young undocumented immigrant: stand up and be counted. Since then, Mattos has traveled across the state—and country—to help organize other undocumented youth and empower them to speak out about their status. After participating in a hunger strike organized by the New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC), an organization led by undocumented youth, Mattos joined the group to fight for passage of the New York version of the federal Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM). The DREAM Act allows young undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to earn temporary residency by serving in the military or earning a college degree. New York’s version would give undocumented youth the chance to apply for state financial aid. As this issue went to press, NYSYLC and other organizations were urging state senators and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to include funding for the DREAM Act in the state budget. Mattos eventually became an advocacy coordinator at NYSYLC, where she worked with immigration attorneys and advocated to stop the deportations of undocumented youth. Mattos contacted legislators to enlist support for the National Immigrant Youth Alliance’s “Education Not Deportation” campaign and, by connecting families with legal representation, helped stop dozens of New Yorkers from being deported. Then she went to New Orleans, where thousands of Latino undocumented workers settled after Hurricane Katrina. “There wasn’t a space for undocumented youth to voice their concerns and opinions,” Mattos says, so she co-founded DREAM Activist Louisiana with DREAM Activist L.A., to organize legal clinics and events that would encourage other young immigrants to come out of the shadows. Mattos came back from Louisiana a year later with a long list of goals—like writing a “road to college” handbook for young DREAMers to help them turn their obstacles into opportunities, just as she has done. Ineligible for government financial aid, she worked in restaurants to pay for college and graduate school, earning an M.A. in political science from Brooklyn College and securing an internship at the Bolivian mission to the United Nations. Mattos hopes to go back to Bolivia to make a difference one day—as a new citizen of the United States. That possibility seems to be getting closer every day. Mattos applied for President Barack Obama’s DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program last year to secure a legal work permit and, as of press time, her application was still being processed. But as Obama and Senate leaders work to push through comprehensive immigration reform this spring, she may be able to secure permanent residency and eventually, citizenship. “If the federal DREAM Act passes my life would change,” Mattos says. “My idea is that first and foremost, you should be able to be a citizen.” Watch an AQ Q&A with Tania Mattos below. Back to top Business Innovator: Instiglio, United States Public spending on social programs often involves high levels of government expenditure with little emphasis on impact and outcomes. Enter Instiglio, a Boston-based nonprofit social enterprise that hopes to bring the social impact bond (SIB) model—also known as a pay-for-success contract—to emerging economies such as India and Colombia. The concept turns the old development model on its head. With SIBs, governments contract with third parties to finance projects that have few funding opportunities but a large social impact. Unlike normal contracts, the government commits to pay for improved social outcomes—not just for the implementation of a project. Instiglio’s three co-founders, Michael Belinsky, 28, Michael Eddy, 27, and Avnish Gungadurdoss, 26, believed that SIBs could work as well in the developing world as they have in developed countries. “We saw a problem in international development, and created a solution,” says Belinsky, who hopes that the SIB model will “revolutionize” the way nonprofits currently operate around the world. The three founders, all 2012 graduates of Harvard University’s Kennedy School, were able to obtain seed funding for Instiglio after winning the Public Sector Innovation Award presented by Accenture in the Harvard College Innovation Challenge. The award also scored them a residency at Harvard’s Innovation Lab during the summer of 2012, enabling the team to develop their business model. Instiglio is establishing a pilot program in Colombia in 2012 and second program in India in 2013. In Colombia, they are working with the mayor of Medellín to design an SIB focused on a program to reduce adolescent pregnancy. Instiglio is starting with an analysis of who gets pregnant and why, to set a target percentage rate in the reduction of pregnancies. This will then guide them on how best to structure the SIB contract between the Medellín government and private investors. The program in India is aimed at closing the gender gap in education, in partnership with a local NGO, Educate Girls. In this proposal, the NGO would receive a mix of private investment and funding from the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID) to track school enrollment and retention rates over a three-year period and measure educational achievement. Instiglio’s programs rely on identifying investors willing to provide the capital to create and implement a program, and on getting agreement from a government body to repay investors only if and when the program achieves its goals. In Colombia, for example, if adolescent pregnancy is reduced by a pre-determined percentage after the implementation of the program, then it will be considered a success. If Instiglio’s programs succeed, the government will repay investors with a financial return. If the programs do not reach their goals, the investors lose their money, sparing taxpayers the costs of the program. The benefits are multifold—public savings, the scaling up of promising programs, new avenues for impact investing, and improvements in the implementation of social services. Both programs have yet to be implemented, so it is too early to say whether they will succeed. “At the end of the day, the investor gets excited because it’s an opportunity to invest money in a type of organization and asset that it has not traditionally invested in before, and the government is able to transfer risk that it hasn’t been able to do before,” says Belinsky. The founders are hoping that their investment and time pay off—but as they turn down post-graduation job offers, they don’t seem too worried. “We are young,” Belinsky says. “This is the time to do innovative, risky things, and we think we’ll be able to learn quite a lot from it.”