My Family From My Eyes: Empowering Families in Colombia (VIDEO)

My Family From My Eyes: Empowering Families in Colombia
Decades of civil conflict have torn Colombian communities apart. Repairing the economic and social fabric of these communities requires restoring basic services, creating opportunities for improved livelihoods and rebuilding trust among residents and local government. Through the ANDA (Go Forward) program, Global Communities is working with some of the most conflict-impacted communities in northern Colombia to do just this. More than just restoring services and helping to alleviate poverty, ANDA calls upon residents to define their own future and become active actors in the renewal of their communities. Funded by BHP Billiton Sustainable Communities (BSC), the ANDA program is specifically designed to address the needs of internally displaced persons and vulnerable communities to complement poverty reduction efforts by the national government. 
Through ANDA’s income generation activities, more than 400 victims of violence and displacement have received support to start and manage their own small business enterprises. These activities, not only help provide better incomes and improved livelihoods for the families participating, they have also resulted in intangible, harder-to-measure benefits as well. To capture some of these, ANDA hosted a special workshop is which youth, whose parents had participated in the income generation program, were given basic video training. Armed with this training and some camera equipment, they were encouraged to tell their families’ stories from their own points of view. The result is this short video – My Family From My Eyes – where they and their families talk about how their lives have changed and their dreams for the future.