After five years, five cohorts, and 39 documentaries and podcasts, the Viva Voz Fellowship is coming to an end. We are now concluding the fifth cohort with six powerful projects about afro Colombian communities’ relationships with rivers, rap from the Pacific coast, animated testimonies of the armed conflict, football fans from Medellín, and the return of a Wayuu community to their homeland. You can check them out on our website along with the projects from the other cohorts.
Over this five-year project, the fellows produced 39 short documentaries, 53 podcast episodes, and conducted more than 30 workshops and dialogue spaces. With the fourth cohort, we ran the largest social media campaign for the Truth Commission's report in Colombia, which garnered over seven million views.
These results were made possible by the three fundamental goals of the fellowship: to connect talented communicators and creators; to support them in telling the stories of their communities on their own terms; and to encourage them to make their stories the centerpiece of improbable dialogues, conversations that otherwise would not have occurred.
The program began in 2020 in partnership with the Truth Commission, the largest listening and historical clarification initiative in Colombia's history, and was planned to end after the commission wrapped up its work. While the commission organized social dialogues around the country and investigated the dynamics of the armed conflict, the Viva Voz fellows dedicated themselves to telling stories about peacebuilding processes in their communities. All of this was possible thanks to the support of Luminate and the Ford Foundation.
Viva Voz contributed to the transitional justice period that is still ongoing. We took on the task of telling stories about the armed conflict, and the fellows opened up the program to diverse peacebuilding initiatives. Together, we told stories about popular soccer fan clubs, menstrual health, exile, rap, the Indigenous Guard, and many other topics across Colombia’s five regions.
Over the next two months, we will be posting about the projects and these five years of work on Memria's social media pages (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X). Please follow and tag us in any of your posts celebrating the end of this fellowship.