2024 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

Tekom' boe: Caminos de Tiza (Chalk Paths) is a practice developed between the Community and the Public-State (Municipality).

It involves the development of participatory activities and proposals in colonias (urban settlements), rural areas, native/indigenous villages and vulnerable neighbourhoods of Comandante Andresito (Misiones, Argentina), in border areas, intercultural, bilingual, migration areas, mainly (in this case) focused on understanding and addressing Functional Diversity (Disability), Linguistic (four languages are spoken) and Cultural (migrants, Tekoas Mby'a Guarani, settlers), not for, but with and from co-participation in the territory.

It is an itinerant model of spaces for action, listening, accompaniment and advice, as well as training of Community Peer Referents.

The Installed Capacity, providing the participants with tools and mechanisms to attend to and understand Rights, to propose and act in an active and proactive way, is the pillar of this mode of intervention which, at the same time, provides tools and resources for socio-community actions (Schools, drilling, tools, Solidarity Clothes, Grants, etc.).

Its model is based on providing people with spaces, services and projects so that they can adapt, appropriate and transform themselves in their environment, in accordance with their context, becoming agents of replication or innovation in their social, civic and political responsibility, breaking away from a welfare-based approach and thus enabling participation to be sustainable over time.

It is based on Educating/Teaching, mechanisms of effective Participation, of Educating in Rights, and of promoting citizens to develop alternative and/or complementary networks to the State/Government.

It (re)signifies the value and importance of Representative Democracy, and at the same time configures a form of constructive and propositive denunciation and protest to its realities.