Ten words that define us

10 WORDS THAT DEFINE US

LEADERSHIP A leader is part of the support that leverages the changes in a society. Building leadership involves expanding knowledge, tools, and possibilities for more people to move the world and take the necessary steps to transform their environment in a positive way. A leader reaches out and guides. A leader believes in the power of others and in collective power. Leadership has been Visible Hand’s greatest bet.

At the root of it all, leading is serving. It is meeting the needs of a group of people, ensuring their safety and give them the support they need to grow. A true leader transcends individual interests - whether political or personal - and gives priority

to the human beings in his or her care. Mata Amina

TRANSFORMATION Identical with change, transformation is the challenge of taking the elements that we have at hand to do something new with them. There is no element of nature that is not transformed in its growth process: the seeds make it into trees, the continents into changing geographies, the molecules into chemical elements. The transformations generate breaks with previous molds, but they are necessary for evolution. Leaders transform realities.

Changes will not come if we wait for someone else to make them or at another time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.

Barack Obama POWER Power is the ability to generate transformations and move actions. When leaders gain power, they also gain the advocacy to transform their environment and their community. Human power, contrary to that of nature, arises from reflection on the common welfare and has one purpose: to serve others so that the members of their community evolve. The fact that power is disfigured and generates inequity or exclusion forces us to reinvent it from the leadership. Power is what the peripheral regions have gained in the last ten years.

The most common way people give up their power is to think they don’t have any.

Alice Walker Jr

PEACE Peace is the absence of conflict. If peace is conceived as a concept grounded in the territory and its daily reality, to speak of peace in the Pacific, a region that concentrates 125 municipalities critical to the post-conflict, is to speak of an issue that many still do not know and that its inhabitants find more symbolic than real. A peace that does not have the territories or local leaderships is an exclusive peace. In this region, plagued by unlawfulness and the historical neglect of the State, peace is a fundamental structural issue. Therefore, it must emerge as a bet of active citizens, actors for territorial peace, who clearly propose to the government and international cooperation the priority lines to build local strategies to achieve it.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.

Martin Luther King Jr

The people will never give up! Never!

Pacific Civic Strike Movement 2017

RESISTANCE Resistance is the force that opposes a sometimes for dominant force. When the resistance is strong enough, it becomes a transformative power because of how it forces dynamic change. In electrical circuits, resistance is the element inserted in circuits that modifies the flow of current and generates heat. The resistance that excluded populations emit flow in opposition to the forceful dynamics that are the ones exclude them. Visible Hands supports resistance from leadership and from education as an engine of change, based on knowledge and empowerment.

People resist, people resist, people resist, because our song still exists.

“Oye nuestro canto’, Ensamble Pacífico

TRANSCENDENCE The power of this word, transcendence, lies in the fact that it speaks of the capacities of each person to shape their environment, family, community, territory and beyond, to fulfill a vital and collective mission of transformation. A leader that transcends and works with transcendence is equal to a memory that is not forgotten: it leaves a mark and affects the emotions; it also speaks of the greatness of the spirit. Edgard Gouveia, a member of Afroinnova, said that, “the great task of Afro-descendants in their future agenda is to move from the power of resistance to the power of transcendence.” Visible Hands is committed to leaders who take that step, leaders that leave their mark and transcend.

When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream”, he was not playing games, he meant it. When he imagined it, he created it, he created it in his own mind, and he began to be. We must dream it too.

Toni Morrison NETWORK A network can be described as an organized fabric. Just like a spider web, it is a network of threads destined for a survival purpose, like a digital road or telephone network, it is a set of elements that are interconnected for a greater purpose. When there is no connection and there is no sense of an ecosystem that allows the network to grow, populations become disconnected and lose power and the transformative impact of their leaders is not as effective. The network is the connection that allows change and the flow of new ideas. In a solid ecosystem, and community that are related to each other, that network is always possible, and contains a vital energy.

In Colombia, culture is the spiritual and emotional infrastructure of the country; an infrastructure that connects memories and expressions, and is capable of uniting and highlighting differences, as well as putting value on shared meanings.

Paula Moreno

CULTURE Everything that makes up a population is part of its culture. The material that makes up any culture ranges from its songs and dances to its ancestral medicines and musical instruments, also the way it expresses itself, its diversity, and the constructions that exist in the territory. In the case of territories like the Pacific, culture is wealth. And it is through the wealth of each population that leaders must work to strengthen their networks and expand ecosystems, to generate resistance and gain power and finally transcend. Culture is the capital and currency of our transformation.

People do not have prescribed role-models. We get our

reference from our culture. Lázaro Ramos

VISION Vision looks to the future. Someone with vision can foresee the best possible scenario to come. Looking at things from a new perspective means that it is possible to see them from another angle. Visible Hands has opted to empower its leaders from the commitment to the regions so that there are new possibilities, both in the leaders and from the country itself. According to the users of social networks who defined Visible Hands in a word, the vision of the corporation goes hand in hand with its ability to “empower” and generate “opportunities”, “make visible” and connect them from the “love” for its history and territory. All these words for a new vision of leadership.

Education is our passport to the future. Tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Malcolm X

EDUCATION Power develops when a person is given the tools to learn how to manage it. Leadership is acquired when the image of exclusion is changed, and it is understood that inclusion changes. It is also understood that inclusion and a new narrative of history are both possible. Opportunities arise when education is strengthened. Networks are built when education and corporation is refined, and a collective power is created. Education is not an accumulation of knowledge, but an accumulation of power. Having education is having the possibility of transforming.

We have the ability to create the future of each individual person, for that person to invent their own teleology and organize their own values to find a harmonious balance between the different

dimensions of existence. Felwine Saar