Mexico City’s Historic Center Foundation, Free Association
Mexico’s City Historic Center Foundation is a Carlos Slim’s Foundation non-profit association. It was instituted in year 2002 by the economic support of Telmex Foundation. Since its onset, Mexico’s City Historic Center Foundation has worked to improve Historic Center’s dwellers living conditions, being supported by Historic Center Real State, Telmex Foundation, and Carlos Slim Foundation. These actions have created many jobs and improved public space by tightening security, improving health-care services, and encouraging sound cultural activities. The foundation currently advances the following programs: economic, community and social development, and cultural activities.
Economic Development Program
The Economic Development Program runs training shops for the young in order to have them able to being employable or running their own businesses. Training shops focus young’s creative abilities in offering products and services to improving their own life-quality standards.
According to that goal, a public-private program was created to thwart the multifarious effects of young´s unemployment and social exclusion.
Social Development Program
The Social Development Program offers both individual and collective development choices to individual, familiar, and social improvement by means of psychosocial strategies.
It offers the following services:
- Personal and group psychological care through an intervention set including crisis intervention, art therapy, dance therapy, and magic circle, among other techniques.
- Human development shops offering tools, abilities, and knowledge to improve life quality and personal relationships.
- To link persons to both civil society and public institutions in order to reinforce services and institutional strengthening.
Community Development Program
The Community Development Program runs psychosocial risk and education-social preventive actions. It focuses Historic Center’s dwellers and visitors in public spaces, schools, plazas and businesses. Its main goal is encouraging persons’ abilities and knowledge to take charge of their own progress and wellbeing.
Likewise, it is intended to profiting from the zone’s disposable resources to preserve and maximize their economic, political, and social value.
Cultural Program
The Mexico City’s Foundation do offers a variety of cultural activities for dwellers and visitors, so encouraging people’s participation.
Casa Vecina (Neighbor House)
Casa Vecina is a non-conventional cultural space for contemporary art-production, assembly and research. It encourages studio art and exhibitions as continual and experimental art processes.
Tradition, exhibition and contest
This program is aimed to reinvigorate Mexican art traditions by arranging popular-arts contests and exhibitions in public spaces.
Contests are aimed to attract young and families to the Historic Center to reinvigorate popular traditions. “Día de muertos” (Halloween) is the most popular contest since ten years ago (November 1th).
Achievements
During the last ten years, the Mexico City’s Historic Center Foundation has benefited more than five million persons (see table).
Mexico City’s Historic Center Foundation |
|
| RESULTS | 2001-2010 |
| SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT | |
| Health-care actions (benefited people) |
22,404 |
| Ver para aprender program (lens donation) | 7,514 |
| Community Development Actions (consultations, shops, key-note addresses, talks) |
7,824 |
| Social Development Actions (consultations, shops, school visits) | 42,314 |
| CONTESTS AND TRADITIONS | |
| Contests (participants) |
140,500 |
| Tradition and exhibitions in San Francisco Temple Atrium (visitors) |
3,919,000 |
| ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT | |
| CECATI Grants |
2,728 |
| Micro-credits | 1,812 |
| Craft training shops (benefited persons) | 1,471 |
| CULTURAL PROGRAM | |
| Neighbor house (visitors) |
40,675 |
| Public space exhibitions (visitors) | 1,725,000 |
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