Jose Maria Gonzalez Perez

An architect by training, Jose Maria “Peridis” Perez Gonzalez uses cultural heritage to drive local development, boost employment, and bring marginalized youth more fully into society.

Peridis is using cultural heritage as a basis to create new jobs and institutions that offer unemployed youth an opportunity to learn a trade and make a living while boosting local development. Through Trade School Workshops, which he founded to teach trade skills to unemployed young people, Peridis enables them to find jobs restoring historical sites. Today, Trade School Workshops are funded by government unemployment subsidies and have graduated a half million people, helping almost 80 percent of graduates find jobs. These people are embracing new roles as citizens and contributing to their communities. This is a dramatic transformation for a generation of youth accustomed to living on government unemployment wages. The development Peridis promotes is based on local needs, and ties together community histories and locales in the process. For example, his Foundation of Santa Maria la Real helps people create heritage-based businesses, such as, turning old homes into hotels, to boost local economies. More broadly, Peridis believes having pride in one’s culture and region can trigger the imagination and jumpstart the energy of disengaged youth around the world. For this reason, Peridis’s model is as relevant in Spain as it is in Latin America or Africa, where he has replicated Trade School Workshops, and expanded skills training to include trades such as environmental regeneration, and is exploring the possibility of creating professions in urban rehabilitation.

In the early 1980s, Spain’s economy was struggling to recover from the end of a dictatorship. Unemployment was over 50 percent, with women and young people facing the most difficulty in finding jobs. Young people experiencing marginalization in their communities, particularly those who had dropped out of the formal education system, had limited job skills and little hope of finding employment. Government subsidies were given to the unemployed, but these only contributed to a widespread apathy among jobless youth. At the end of the day, youth lacked the self-esteem, support, and motivation to become productive citizens.

Today these problems—unemployment, lack of job skills, marginalization, and apathy—pose obstacles to youth around the world, as evidenced by the large numbers of people migrating from Latin America and Africa to industrialized nations to find jobs. However, these problems often exist parallel to unmet local development needs, such as the restoration of crumbling buildings and neighborhoods or environmental conservation. These struggles present the opportunity for young people to be taught the trade skills that will help them find jobs, as well as answer their community’s unmet needs.

When Peridis began his work, he identified a development opportunity in the hundreds of crumbling historic sites throughout Spain. Spain’s master craftsmen, along with their knowledge of historic restoration, were dying out. A new generation of craftspeople was needed to carry on their tradition and preserve Spain’s rich cultural heritage.

In 1985, Peridis launched the Trade School Workshops to help unemployed young people get jobs restoring Spain’s historic sites. Peridis focused on historic restoration over other sectors of employment because it was an unmet need, and he believed having youth use their minds and imaginations would engage them in their work and restore their sense of self-esteem. Moreover, heritage sites and monuments are a source of pride for local communities, these jobs are highly valued, and would enable youth to integrate more fully into society.

Trade School Workshops employ master craftsmen as teachers and offer one to two year training courses combining classroom learning with hands-on internships. Trade Schools can be public or private, most are created by a town or neighborhood that decides it wants to restore a building or historical site. Communities can access special funding from the European Union and local governments for these activities. Peridis’s program has been widely successful, with the overwhelming majority of participants in Trade School Workshops finding jobs by its conclusion; generally doing restoration work for local governments or in related fields.

Shortly after he began, Peridis convinced the national government to use unemployment subsidies to pay for his model, enabling him to provide stipends to students while they were learning and working. The use of unemployment subsidies to pay for Trade School Workshops has shifted the mindset of a generation of apathetic youth now actively contributing to their communities.

Government funding has also been a critical resource in convincing towns, local administrations, and citizen organizations to implement the model according to their local needs.

Rather than create a huge organization, Peridis helped the National Institute of Employment take over coordination of the program. By 1990, his model was implemented across Spain, with over 1,000 Trade School Workshops, 50,000 participants, and 8,000 trainers. Peridis spread his model to Latin America, where Trade School Workshops now operate in over seventeen countries. Today, almost a half million students in Spain and Latin America have gone through this program and thousands of important historical sites have been restored.

In 1994, Peridis founded the Foundation of Santa Maria la Real to take his model to the next level, promoting heritage as an important driver of local economic development. The foundation trains people to start enterprises based on local historic sites, traditions, and culture. Today, the foundation has 200 staff members running various programs to train students, research new restoration technologies, and educate the public about national heritage through a television series and other communications. The foundation also hosts a network of trade groups—an important resource for Trade School Workshops. To date, graduates have established over 100 businesses, and currently, Peridis is replicating the foundation’s work in other parts of Spain.

Peridis continues to bring the Trade School Workshops to countries that face similar problems to those of Spain twenty-five years ago: High unemployment, lack of job skills, and marginalized youth. In Senegal, for example, Peridis is stemming youth migration through Trade School Workshops focused on entrepreneurship, historic site restoration, environmental clean-up, and tourism infrastructure. Peridis is also exploring the idea of engaging youth in Latin America and Africa in urban projects, rehabilitating slums and historical city centers. In every case, Peridis converts problems into opportunities.

Peridis grew up in a small rural town that housed the ruins of an important Cluniac monastery, Santa Maria la Real. This historical site sparked a lifelong passion, inspiring him to study architecture at university. Early in his career, he developed several patents for prefabricated houses and worked for several environmental organizations. Peridis has always tried to find the best design to make things simple and replicable.

In 1977, Peridis founded the Association of Friends of the Santa Maria la Real Monastery. There he conceived his model and began testing it, developing what would become the curriculum of the Trade School Workshops.

Throughout his work, Peridis has been an expert at proving the success of his ideas and building the enthusiasm and support of others. He has been recognized with many awards and honors, including the Medalla de Oro de las Bellas Artes and the Premio Europa Nostra. Peridis is also a well-known political caricaturist, has written several books, and participated in a television series.