From Prison to Peace: How One Social Worker Built a Model for Youth Rehabilitation
A Colombian social worker transformed his own journey through violence and exile into a scalable intervention that redirects young people away from armed groups toward education and enterprise. His organization now exports coffee globally while teaching nonviolent communication—demonstrating how personal resilience can reshape post-conflict development policy and create sustainable social enterprises.
Originaltitel: Empathy from Origin: A Colombian Social Worker’s Life Story
<p>He came out of violence, prison, and ashes from the civil war in Colombia. As a political refugee, he met the Swedish practices of popular education. With the image of bird Fenix in mind, coming to Sweden 2005 he asks himself: How could I be reborn? The life story of Liam tells the struggle and the joy in meeting with the Swedish society, and his way back to a socially engaged work in Colombia. In Sweden Liam deepens his thoughts on what resocialization can mean, as an art of authentic change. Eventually, the peace process opens an opportunity for him to return to Colombia, with the aim to work for a shift in young persons’ minds: choose a book, not a weapon. His outer, and inner, journey to Sweden had prepared him with tools to recreate an organization that he had started before the exile – Ajovec (Association for young people in change). Through Ajovec he develops a nonformal education program based on nonviolent communication and cultivation. Ajovec manages to start a small coffee farm, where young people are now learning together and producing coffee, that is exported to Sweden. As Liam puts it: I can understand my story through the metaphor of the coffee; from the connection between the coffee seed planted in Colombian soil, through the cultivation in a process of authentic social work and empathy, to a cup of coffee enjoyed by a Swede sending a thought to the young persons at the farm in Colombia, in process of rebirth. From this experience the concept of empathy from origin was elaborated. </p>