Change Making Tour in Latin America

The main aim of this project was to develop a new mobility scheme, fully organised and implemented by NGOs and local communities in Latin America (LatAm from now on). These mobilities were defined “Change Making Tours” (CMT from now on): a mixture of cultural awareness tours and change-making actions organised by local NGOs, with the purpose of offering quality-learning experiences to international participants, raise awareness at international and local level on local issues and financially support NGOs and local communities through social entrepreneurship.CMT provided LatAm partners with a tool to promote their activities, help the local community and raise awareness on the Change-making Chosen Topics (CMCTs from now on) that are more relevant to their communities according to their needs analysis.The project had a 1st phase, before covid pandemic, in which we had 2 international meetings (in Italy and in Brazil) and the Study Visits in LatAm countries. In this phase we worked mostly on the concept of Change Making Tour, starting from social entrepreneurship and sustainable tourism. We integrated a CRM system (Sales Force, that we have for free as an NGO) in the website, we defined the marketing strategy and therefore the video and social media strategy. Moreover, we initiated the mobility of Colombian and Dominican Republic International Volunteers (IVS from now on), who arrived in Europe in the end of Feb-2020.Then the pandemic arrived and we had to change all the plans, at first the plans for the just-arrived IVS (i.e. the 2 Colombian IVS got stuck in Italy, the activities had to change etc). We had to wait for a long time for the pandemic period to be over, because of the closed borders and the alternation of the pandemic pick times from LatAm and the EU. Finally, in the beginning of 2022, with less than 6 months to complete the project, we restarted the activities, but in the meanwhile MUDHA, the Dominican Republic partner, was forced to get un-active in the activities due to the political situation in the island. We kept on with the rest of the consortium: we had the international meeting to train the future IVS from the EU going to LatAm to produce videos and other promotional contents in Jan-2022. From February till April the IVS did their experience, and we also implemented the Study Visits to test the CMT format, in which the local dissemination events took place. We didn’t involve paying participants in the CMTs done in Brazil and Colombia, because the pandemic situation was still too unstable, and we could not involve the video-maker for covid-related reasons. Still, the CMTs were a very positive experience, and got a wide visibility thanks to the involvement of 2 influencers. Right after, we implemented the final evaluation and the dissemination events in Spain and In Italy. Moreover, we diverted part of the unspent budget to offer an additional support to the volunteers to post-produce their videos and to create a toolkit in which we collected the technical knowledge for video-making and online communication we acquired during the project. So, besides the many challenges, we tested the CMT format, and created the promotional materials for its promotion, reaching the basic goals of the project, and we managed to inspire and motivate ourself and some of the stakeholders we engaged in the project to keep working on CMT and on sustainable tourism with native communities.