Empowering the Leadership of the Children of Qquencco in the Qoricocha Community Forest
Location:
Qquencco, Coya, Peru (high Andes)
Art Medium:
Video & Visual Arts (posters)
Partner:
Asociación Campesina Forestal
Artist:
The Challenge
Qquencco is a high-Andean Quechua community of roughly 400 people whose livelihoods depend on a 1,400-hectare landscape that has become severely eroded. Decades of soil and water loss have made subsistence farming barely viable, and the next generation is growing up without much hope for it. When the project’s 25 participating primary-school students were first asked about their future, most said they loved their home but didn’t believe they could make a living there, and half pictured the years ahead as drier rivers, dying trees, and polluted water. Without young people willing and able to lead, the long-term restoration of the Qoricocha Community Forest had no one to carry it forward.
The Action
• Workshops with 25 primary-school students that surfaced their hopes and fears for the territory, including a hands-on demonstration of how vegetation protects soil from erosion
• Group exercises that mapped the community’s environmental problems and possible solutions, then translated those messages into a script for a video the students would narrate
• Creative training in theater, photography, poster design, and video, alongside field trips to a nearby environmental education center and seed bank to ground the work in practical examples
• Community-wide workdays to plant trees, build terraces, install a greenhouse at the school, and clean the local lagoon, capped by the premiere of the students’ video
The Impact
• 1,000 trees planted and ~500 meters of terraces with infiltration ditches built, forming the physical foundation for restoring an eroded mountainside
• Youth-produced video “It’s Time to Sow Change” premiered to ~100 community members and now circulating on social media as an ongoing recruiting tool for the restoration effort
• A clear shift among the 25 participating students from a split between hope and pessimism toward a shared sense of agency over their community’s future
• A formal, ongoing partnership between Asociación Campesina Forestal and Qquencco Primary School, with one member from each of 80 families showing up for the community workdays, far beyond what organizers expected
Photo Gallery
