Our Visionnary Approach

Once upon a time, around 16 years back, Centro American artistic partners, Canadian partners and we, co-created shows covering a variety of water topics. Those shows would tour in the intervention zones about a hundred times and would be featured twice in most of those rural and remote villages.  ​They were accompanied by artistic workshops where teenagers who had learned artistic techniques to express water problems would replicate their experiences in communities to engage everyone in the movement. This is how it all started.

After a few years co-creating these types of interventions in Central America, we started asking ourselves if there was a way to scale this deeper? ​Why scale deeper? Because we suspected our impact was limited.  ​We were doing sensitization, awareness work and training.

Scaling deeper means working towards having a stronger impact on people lives.  ​

For us, sustainability requires people to engage in change, and we wanted the community members to participate in a way that would be meaningful to them.  ​Limiting our interventions to sharing information with communities was just not enough to reach our goals, and neuroscience confirmed this. ​

We went back to the drawing board. 10 years of learnings, failures, successes, experimentation, prototyping have been combined to create a new way of shaping change processes by following the steps of behaviour change and combining them with our expertise; art. Our approach is inspired by our heritage from Cirque du Soleil’s creative nexus, that we mixed with cognitive science, educational psychology, and social anthropology. We call it SOCIAL ART because it is art made FOR, BY and WITH the participants. In social art, there are no spectators.  To quote Boal, everyone has a role to play, everyone is a SPECTACTOR. ​

This is how we went from sensitization with art to co-creating social art processes to encourage the practice of healthy behaviours. We have collaborated with hundreds of artists in over 14 countries, for the last 16 years, to encourage the sustainable practice of WASH behaviours such as handwashing with soap and water at critical moments, the systemic use of latrines, and to improve menstrual hygiene management. These behaviours have a significant impact on people’s health and global wellbeing –especially on the lives of girls and women.

L’accompagnement que nous sommes en mesure d’offrir dans le cadre d’un projet/programme se conjugue en complémentarité avec vos propres modèles.  Ensemble, nous pouvons atteindre des résultats durables et ainsi contribuer aux Objectifs de Développement Durable des Nations Unies et bien plus !  

L’accompagnement technique vise à favoriser et à renforcer la synergie entre les acteurs d’un système (WASH, santé, etc.) dans l’adoption et le maintien de comportements et de pratiques respectueux des personnes et de l’environnement, en puisant aux valeurs, aux cultures et aux savoirs en interaction sur un territoire donné. 

Nous demeurons une organisation apprenante et n’avons pas la prétention de tout connaître, maîtriser ou même comprendre.  Nous portons un profond respect aux partenariats qui nous ont permis de grandir et de développer notre contribution au secteur WASH.  C’est dans cet esprit de réciprocité et de vision à long terme que nous voulons établir les paramètres de cette collaboration en incarnant nos valeurs de respect, d’ouverture d’esprit et de créativité.  

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