Facilitating individual, collective and environmental healing

The Corioli Institute has accompanied a range of project in La Reforma (Angostura) on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, Sinaloa, Mexico. Once a prosperous town, La Reforma has significantly suffered from declining maritime animal populations, the ecological degradation of its bay threatening the livelihoods of its inhabitants, the presence of organized crime, and challenges stemming from drug addiction and gender-based violence. Our local partners in La Reforma are from "SUCEDE - Sociedad En Acción Sinaloa", an NGO that facilitates workshops, communal action endeavours and alternative economic opportunities as part of an integrated approach aimed at fostering individual healing among community members, rebuilding the social fabric, and restoring La Reforma’s natural environment and maritime ecosystem.

SUCEDE is currently implementing the "Schools of Forgiveness and Reconciliation" (ESPERE) pedagogies in la Reforma, having started with the community's women only. The program had proven itself to be immensely succesful in healing trauma and building positive, forward-looking sense of self aming participants. In collaboration with our Institute, SUCEDE expanded the ESPERE process to La Reforma's men, incorporating a participatory research methodology aimed at promoting social cohesion and raising awareness around gender-based violence. Through active community participation and engagement, we developed an early warning system for violence and environmental degradation, metrics for intervention success, and support for strengthening SUCEDE's underlying organizational processes. Through active community participation and engagement, we developed metrics for intervention success while devising the underlying organizational processes. Participants chose to create a documentary film of the ESPERE process as the final product of the methodology, which is ongoing as we continue to work with the community.

Moreover, the Corioli Institute is supporting SUCEDE by having ESPERE intervention participants, their families and La Reforma’s wider community identify persisting problems and priorities relating their personal and public lives in surveys and interviews while also measuring perceptions of initiating change among them. This helps SUCEDE assess the impact of their activity and inspire future initiatives while also serving as a form of policy guidance for local government.