Testimonies
"Chelsea Viteri's workshops centered on community knowledge production and social change have significantly impacted my theatre students over the years and introduced them to ways of transforming their world. Her vast knowledge, advanced education, and experience inform her workshop methods and praxis focused on strengthening relationships, producing new knowledge, disrupting dominant systems, generating paths toward change, and creating a more just world. Her highly engaging, co-creative, and embodied workshops intertwine expansive world views, storytelling, performance activism, and applied theatre techniques develop both individual and communal skill building."
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Sarah d'Angelo
Theater Professor at Brown University
“Zia has great skills in managing diverse groups and collective spaces. She is a sensitive and empathetic professional who knows how to organize and maintain the structure of collective workspaces. Her extensive experience in different contexts in the Americas with a gender focus and great analytical skills make her an ideal person to guide discussions and achieve goals together, making the meetings safe and participatory spaces. Her proficiency in English and Spanish is a reflection of more than eight years accompanying social organizations in the region, contributing to capacity building and the security and protection of activists and human rights defenders."
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Sofia Hurtado,
Civil Rights Defenders, Colombia
"I am a community organizer linked to several spaces, including academic, cultural management, street dance, and the ancestral cosmovision ones. My life is grounded in collective creative practices that use art to explore our identities, collective memory, understandings, and intergenerational knowledge. I have facilitated several processes with Chel Viteri, and walking and collaborating with her is powerful. Between conversations, silences, gestures, deep listening, glances, and feelings she brought to me, I have been able to question, transform, learn, unlearn, remember, and dialogue about how I am situated in the world. The movement she embodies in her facilitation creates a kaleidoscope of possibilities to understand each other through beauty and subtlety without romanticizing these forms but being aware of the many manifestations of life. Reciprocity is something characteristic of Chel; she reaches every heart of the people who know her; she is a safe space, a bonfire where to take shelter. She creates a circular communication and dialogue in which we all become part of this beautiful learning and teaching. "
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Erika Cordova
Community Organizer, Ecuador
"The orientation provided by Zia Kandler accompanying FPP team members (as an international NGO working in Colombia) was a very fruitful experience for the participants in our joint quest to update our internal self-protection system in the country. What we liked very much was Zia's methodology in bringing together our thoughts as a team, and her sensitive style of facilitating the construction of practical solutions to reduce the risks that we and our partners face in the territories. At the end of the two-day meeting, we all felt somehow healed with more strength to continue in our work. What emerged concretely from our deliberations was our own safeguards and security protocol for the use and application of FPP-Colombia."
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Tom Griffiths
Forest Peoples Program (FPP)
Coordinator in Colombia, January 2024
"I am a community leader. Working with Chel Viteri has been a great learning experience. Her way of walking in this world is inspiring and has strengthened and guided what I want to do in my present and future. The educational process with Chel filled me with confidence in myself. Her pedagogy parts from the understanding that we are all capable of learning and unlearning, that we are all teachers and students, and that affection, respect, humility, and much love are key to the journey. Working with Chel has inspired my leadership and the collective strengthening of my community. As long as life accompanies me, I will sow the seeds of a more balanced society for generations to come. With Chel, I understood the depth of this phrase: 'If I die, I die peacefully, SOMEONE ELSE MUST FOLLOW', and I work on it every day."
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Saúl Bautista
Community Leader, Pintag Amaru, Ecuador
"I live in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and I've had several experiences that have transformed me, such as participating in the spaces of reflection facilitated by Chel Viteri. These spaces became part of my journey of unlearning and relearning. They have invited me to be a better mother, inspired me to respect my son's learning processes, and given me the opportunity to question imposed narratives. It is not so easy to decolonize our minds, but now I have tools that support me, individually and collectively, to transform this world. And I do it daily, without haste, but without pause."
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Lucero Mora
Director, Zanja Arajuna, Ecuador
"Mazorca helped our team really focus in on what our community security resources are as an organization, and what we need to add or sharpen to improve our systems. Zia Kandler and Chelsea Viteri held each session with a lot of care and asked questions that helped us get much more clear. They gave us a lot of ideas and resources that helped us strengthen our work. One of my favorite moments in working with our organizers after these sessions was when one of them thanked us for supporting their agency in their own safety. Mazorca really brought in holistic values around keeping ourselves and each other safe."
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Misha
Showing Up for Racial Justice, SURJ
"Zia Kandler's facilitation was very timely for the self-protection and safety of women, she applies a methodology that allows us to identify from the micro to the macro risk situations to which women leaders are exposed in contexts of high social complexity".
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Clemencia López
Casa Ernestina - CENTRAP
