El Centro Ecuménico para América Latina de Comunicación/The Ecumenical Center for Latin America of Communication (CEPALC) It was born in 1978 to begin to fill the training gap that existed in the area of communication within the popular sectors in Colombia; Although CEPALC was officially founded in Bogotá on January 6, 1978, its first works were developed in a neighborhood of the northeastern commune of Medellín with the very valuable collaboration of Father Federico Carrasquilla, a priest widely known in the city for his vocation of service and the integral delivery to the most humble. Amparo, the founder of our institution, had had a series of experiences training social organizations in the appropriation of the media in different countries of Latin America and these experiences encouraged her to create this pilot project in Colombia.
CEPALC broke the existing scheme regarding communication. Communication was generally understood to be the mass media: press, film, radio and television. We wanted to broaden and deepen the conception of communication by proposing popular communication as a communication that is made from the poor people, for the poor people, defending their interests and their culture. This popular communication incorporated the most playful expressions such as theater, puppets, music and dance. Therefore, since its inception, CEPALC offered training in all these areas and also in photography and sonoviso, which was widely used at that time.
Thanks to our methodology of learning by doing, which is applied democratically and horizontally in training processes and in workshop cycles with social organizations and grassroots groups, we have facilitated the appropriation of the media to the popular sectors of our country.
For CEPALC, the work of training in communication, values and rights of the people of the popular sectors has become a commitment where joy and hope combine to animate our creativity and to make each workshop, each meeting, each shared space, a space of fraternity in the midst of a reality of poverty and social exclusion.
We believe in the transformation of our society and for that reason we have been concerned with a methodology that we have managed to build over years of experience, trials, errors and reflections on the resources, the motivations we have used, the cultural contexts and politicians in which we have worked in each instance of development of our programs.
