(6)Learning Zone Program: Improving the Quality of Life in a Mining Community

摘要

In 2008, given the deep economical and social crisis a mining town was living in Mexico's northwest, as a result of a labor strike detonated in July 2007, which showed no signs of a fast solution, the major employer of the area, a mining company, decided to hire our consulting firm to rebuild confidence and to create a sustainable relationship with the community, to promote their own development and welfare and to build a better environment for the mining company's operations at the same time. Three years after the implementation of a new community engagement model based in mutual responsibility and respect, and with promising results,1 the mining company decided to support and finance a background program that would allow to focus the efforts deployed in previous years in a central priority: the improvement of a learning environment both in and outside the class rooms. The resultant program was titled Learning Zone (LZ). The phase we are sharing here started on December 2011 and ended in 2014. In fact the program represents an educational reform propelled by the community, aimed at boosting a friendly, communicative and shared cultural, social and educational atmosphere, directed at the improvement of the learning for the populations and their quality of life. The program aims to promote an attitude revolution in the different groups of the community in order to achieve a better learning atmosphere that would propel a sense of happiness and collective work. The diagnosis of the community was brought up to date and a strategic plan for the application of the LZ program was designed and goals, short, medium and long term ones, were established; the program was operated through conferences, workshops, work sessions and ludic activities with a specific purpose, coaching and social impact assessment. The program covered 70 percent of the community with 93 percent positive results towards the program. Through activities aimed at awareness raising, training of different groups and by coordinated efforts with community leadership, the formation of learning communities got boosted and specific projects, developed by the same communities, for the attention of the most sensitive needs were enforced, which achieved great citizenship interaction. The program produced human development and community empowerment results, transforming for the better the community-company relationship and setting the foundation to turn the community intervention into an example of organized community work.