Together for the Amazon, Together for the Future

Take action! Together we can ensure that Amazonian peoples have access to decent and quality higher education that respects their culture, territory and knowledge.

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"We hope that our children will be educated, with an education that is proper to the people".

Hilda Santi, amazonian indigenous leader.

Together we can build a sustainable future through intercultural education

🌟 Donate to our campaign Together for the Amazon, Together for the Future, and contribute to open paths of knowledge and opportunities for the communities of the Amazon.

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The proposal of the Amazon University Program (PUAM), born from the unprecedented process of territorial listening that allowed the realization of the Amazon Synod, focuses on building a pedagogy that listens and learns from and with the peoples, expressed in a proposal for multidisciplinary, intercultural and inculturated higher education, and that this be a tool to strengthen their struggles and processes to defend and preserve their lives, their territory, and, ultimately, their future and their right to be-exist.

We design an educational model that transforms minds and hearts, that overcomes the vision of education as a mere act of depositing knowledge on empty minds and that promotes freedom and solidarity.

The economic gaps and the rise of our current consumer system have been determinant in the construction of our diverse daily lives that promote a "throwaway culture" and have derived -also- in the predominant conception of what education should be and, above all, to whom it should be directed.

"Education that does not listen, that does not promote and that does not transform has no meaning and no future".

Paulo Freire

This is a painful reality that is in force in many places of the Amazonian territory, where this conception of "what education should be" has resulted in entire generations excluded by an educational system that has not been able to understand or respond to the reality of the peoples and communities that inhabit this biome.

The campaign "Together for the Amazon, Together for the Future" seeks that society in general, academia, the business sector and the Catholic Church, from where this initiative emerges, can get involved in the challenge proposed by those who walk and weave life in this beautiful and threatened ecosystem, which was welcomed by Pope Francis in 114 of the Final Document of the Synod of the Amazon and has been a mandate assumed by the PUAM, to contribute together and contribute to generate the appropriate conditions to ensure a decent and quality education for Amazonian communities, rural or urban, traditional peoples and other excluded groups, so that they find in this proposal the possibility of acquiring tools to strengthen their community processes in search of justice and good living.

"(A Global Compact on Education) have the courage to place the human person at the centre. (...) In the development of an integral ecology, a central place must be given to the value proper to each creature in its relationship to the people and realities surrounding it, (...) In the development of an integral ecology, a central place must be given to the value proper to each creature in its relationship to the people and realities surrounding it".

Pope Francis
Message for the Launch of the Global Compact on Education

FAQ

How to be part of it?

What shall we do with your contribution?

Associate degree

Community Learning Centers

Academic teams

We are a program that gives continuity to the experience of decades of mission of the Church in the Amazon and the recent processes of articulation to accompany peoples and communities in the territory, offering an innovative proposal with a great commitment and challenge to continue weaving possibilities of more life and life in abundance for this territory and for the whole world. With your donation [link to donations] we are closer to achieving our goals. Together we can build a sustainable future through the defense of life and strengthen the knowledge of the Amazon!

Your donation contributes to our efforts in the design and implementation of higher education programs for the peoples and communities in the Amazon, for the creation, development and equipping of what will be the Community Learning Centers and pedagogical equipment in which these programs we are currently building will be offered. Below you will find detailed information about all these objectives and the concrete way in which your donation will allow us to make them a reality.

The Amazon University Program (PUAM) is the unprecedented response of the Catholic Church to the absence of proposals and offers of adequate and relevant higher education that responds to the concrete reality of many forgotten territories in the Pan-Amazon region. Faced with this reality, and with the experience of accompanying the Church in the processes of promoting life, justice and peace, community development, and the enforceability of the rights of Amazonian communities and peoples, we have begun to design a pedagogical proposal that listens to and learns from the peoples and communities themselves.

Together we want to identify, develop and implement Community Learning Centers in places where higher technical education programs will be offered with a multidisciplinary, intercultural and inculturated approach and that respond to the most urgent needs and challenges of the Amazon.

Your support is essential for us to achieve this goal together with the Amazonian communities. Your donation will be used for:

Finalize the design of our first academic offer, the technical-technological career in Integral Management of the Amazon Territory that gathers the fundamental elements expressed as the most urgent needs for the development and care of the territory from the long process of listening to the peoples and communities. This will be our pilot program!
To finance the process of identification and development of the Community Learning Centers, and equip them with what is necessary for our future students to have the technological elements required to complete their higher education cycle in an optimal manner, as well as to ensure the pedagogical accompaniment that will be necessary.
Twenty percent (20%) of your donation will be destined to operational and administrative expenses of the Program, also facilitating our sustainability and operability.

Our training proposal is integrative, territorial, intercultural and with a Pan-Amazonian approach. This is expressed in the first technical and technological career that we are developing: Integral Management of the Amazon Territory. This career will strengthen the social and collective processes of the participating peoples and communities in the promotion of their identity and life projects, of capacities for the development in reality analysis, project management and defense of their rights in the Pan-Amazonian territoriality.

It is an unprecedented proposal in the midst of the educational offer at the higher technological level in the region, and responds to a particular niche associated with a population and territories systematically excluded from these higher education training processes.

With this proposal, PUAM responds to the mandate of the Amazon Synod (giving continuity to the broad process of weaving territorial networks, listening to the population and ecclesial discernment with the participation of the territory and its representatives), in which a road map, a list of needs and invitations to the entities that constitute the ecclesial body in the region and also in the rest of the world, as well as to the non-ecclesial allied instances, whether territorial organizations, non-governmental or political instances, are marked.

The Community Learning Centers or CCAs are spaces of vital importance to develop PUAM programs for Amazonian communities.

Why?

These are spaces to carry out the hours of face-to-face group activities that are part of each course. They will be a safe place, with electricity and internet access, easily accessible.

They will be planned according to the structures that the community already has, such as schools, churches, community halls, or others. In other words, they will be the expression of co-responsibility as a shared contribution with the participation of the community, civil authorities or church institutions.

Our academic proposal contemplates and needs an accompanying person who will develop the role of facilitator, preferably a person from the territory itself, who knows the context and reality of the students. This person will be the person who will provide support, both for the learning activities and for the uploading and downloading of the activities to the learning platform on which the entire educational process will be developed.

Their presence is essential to promote alliances with local actors that strengthen the accompaniment, both to the training processes and to the other community strengthening processes that are part of the reality, so that the Community Learning Centers are the meeting space where the training processes offered by PUAM will be developed.