Raúl Mendoza Azpiri

Raul Mendoza is unleashing creativity for social development in indigenous and low-income communities in Mexico. His organization, Germinalia, is using creative education and the transformation of public spaces into “spaces of possibility” to help individuals, especially young people, define their own identity and see the power of their own possibility.

Raul Mendoza believes that when people begin to define their own identity and see the power of their own possibility, it creates a mindset shift, enabling them to find their own solutions to the challenges they face. Young people in indigenous and other underprivileged communities in Mexico are a huge resource of untapped human potential, currently limited by poverty and associated fatalistic mindsets both within and toward these communities. Through a technique that engages the community as a whole, Raul is helping young people cultivate their creative, productive capacities so that they can develop their own identities and life paths that make the most of their potential. In doing so, he is introducing an alternative model of education that better prepares young people with the skills and attitudes they need to thrive, no matter what they face in life, while simultaneously enabling communities to tap into their collective creativity to support this type of learning.

In San Cristobal, Raul’s pilot center El Ingenio (The Ingenious) serves as the model for his creative learning methodology. The center targets students coming to the city from some of Mexico’s most marginalized populations, who straddle the threshold of social mobility and vulnerability. El Ingenio is a model “space of possibility,” where anyone who enters the space can freely engage their interests and passions through one or more of five different programs - writing and reading, science and technology, artistic creation, musical production, and youth entrepreneurship. The center pairs high quality professional instructors with individuals with all range of talents, allowing them to learn through discovery in a friendly, collaborative, and informal environment. Students develop talents as they go, and learn to take risks and be creative in their learning process. Rather than boxing them into traditional stereotypes of identity, El Ingenio treats each person as a unique individual, and shifts the focus to developing their creative talents. At the center, participants learn to actually produce and sell creative products, ranging from audio CDs to one-of-a-kind furniture. Through the process of creative achievement, the center cultivates life skills, accomplishment, and problem-solving, helping the individuals to be better equipped for everyday life.

Starting with the reading program from El Ingenio, Raul is working to bring his model of creative education all across Mexico, not by replicating El Ingenio, but instead by spreading its guiding principles and methodology through “hives,” which are community-designed “spaces of possibility” focused on the same type of learning through creative exploration. Raul helps communities to use existing infrastructure and transform standard public spaces like libraries into community creative spaces for children, young people, and the entire community. He builds a collaborative team which includes young people, public officials, and community leaders and trains them to think organically about the uses of the space and how to really make it their own, both for the objectives of the program, e.g. increasing reading, but also for whatever other purposes they choose. Throughout this process, El Ingenio serves as both a model and a training center for the creative learning practices and ways to center the space’s focus on community identity and potential. As they take ownership of the hive, the team transforms a public space into a community of learning, and serves to create a new framework for thinking about problem solving. This process empowers the community to claim creativity as their own, and find solutions for their specific context. Raul has experience across Chiapas and Mexico city, and is now in conversations with local governments to spread his hives, and the spirit of creative learning, across the country.

At the base of the pyramid in Mexico, the question of creative human potential is overwhelmingly ignored. For decades, whether in cities, indigenous villages, or rural communities, these populations have struggled to face the challenges of poverty, illness, and a failed education system which poorly addresses their needs. But the traditional approach to these challenges has created a paternalistic method of approaching them, which sees their lifestyles as inferior and in need of intervention.

In Chiapas, for example, after the Zapatista revolutionary movement of the 1990s, external sources of funding poured into the region to support indigenous communities, but all too often this funding was associated with problematic assumptions about the nature of indigenous identity. Funding was tied to stereotypical understandings of what it meant to be indigenous: identity was assumed to be directly dependent on language or manner of dress. Similarly, in cities across Mexico, give-take programs designed to support poor populations have focused more on providing services than on providing individuals with the life skills they need to succeed on their own.

While some schools in Mexico have chosen to invest in creativity and innovation, there is a prevailing understanding that this culture is a privilege for those that can afford it. At the base of the pyramid, the opportunities assumed to be available are much more limited. A rigid education system, which is ill-suited to Mexico’s diversity of environments, further perpetuates the perception that for those of limited resources, only a handful of predetermined opportunities exist. The human potential of the largest segment of the population remains untapped and undeveloped.

Raul is enabling communities to unleash this latent potential, thus shifting their understanding of what is possible. He does this by connecting a methodology of creative education for young people with community ownership and engagement through public spaces of possibility, all of which is geared toward changing culture and creating opportunity.

Germinalia, Raul’s organization, has designed a methodology for alternative, but parallel, education, focused on creative expression and learning to learn. El Ingenio serves as the model for this type of learning. The center teaches students to develop their own talents in a way that generates creative products as an output, demonstrating that creativity is fundamental and productive, not just a luxury for those who have the time and resources. When they first come to El Ingenio, each person chooses one or more out of the five different creative programs – writing and reading, science and technology, artistic creation, musical production, and youth entrepreneurship – to participate in. The programs are designed in a way where there are no levels, a beginner student can be learning alongside a more experienced one, and during the semester they will together produce an actual product (a book, a song, an invention or even a project geared towards solving a social issue in their communities). This production process complements the learning experience with other life skills, from teamwork to resource management.


For each of these programs, Raul has hired high quality, professional instructors, which apply innovative instructions methods suited for students with a range of talents. Raul believes that the same principle – we can all create with whatever we have – applies to talent as much as resources; thus, students are immersed immediately into the creative process, even as they continue to learn. In this process, they gain valuable life skills and are encouraged to craft their own identity. The space is also open for participants to use it outside workshop hours to work on their projects or other personal tasks.

When it started, El Ingenio was focused on vulnerable youth who moved to the city from rural communities, but the methodology has proven so attractive that they have now opened workshops catering to all children, and the more senior participants have been an active part in the design of the new programs. Raul has worked with local schools to make El Ingenio a formal after school program, and his staff recently worked with the government to embed creative procedures into a national program which taught 5,000 teachers new methodologies in early education.

For Raul, physical space that allows people to come together and to see things differently is an important component in his approach to changing mindsets. El Ingenio is not just an educational program, but also a space of possibility where young people connect with each other, their ideas, and their potential rather than being told what to do. This is the key to unlocking creativity. Physical space is also a resource every community has available to it. Raul strategically works through existing infrastructure, both to ensure sustainability and to demonstrate that creative potential is latent in existing resources and does not require large investments of money, available only to highly resourced communities.

In the scaling of the program, Raul has started with public libraries, an existing government-funded resource in many communities. He offers these libraries a collection of children’s books and a creatively designed reading space that looks like a bee hive (designed and produced by young people at El Ingenio), but the books and reading space are merely a pretext for creating a space of possibility where other aspects of his program at El Ingenio can be adopted, and where the community can create and implement their own ideas. To become a “hive,” a community must choose a team of at least one young person, one public official (in the case of libraries, the library administrator), and one community member, often an involved parent. With Germinalia’s help, this team learns to think about their library or other space as a place where they can generate possibility for the community. While creating the hive, they are trained in creative reading, mediation and how to solve problems by focusing on changeable causes, rather than waiting for outside funding. After a year of monthly trainings, the space is fully incorporated in a network of similar spaces, which can function without Raul’s intervention and which has the intention of having a group of people that can solve problems together, design strategies for the development of communities and involve more people into the programs. There are currently eleven hives across Chiapas and the Federal District. Each community has discovered its own creative uses for the hives, including martial arts classes, math workshops, projecting films, theater productions and music rehearsals.

Part of generating contagion, Raul believes, is proving that this creative way of thinking is financially viable in the long term. The newest component of Germinalia’s strategy is a social business, through which Ingenio provides free education and students are able to sell the products they design in Ingenio’s workshops. These products range from CDs of music the students produce at the center to innovative and artistic furniture originally designed for the hives. Raul believes that by actually producing, students are developing important patterns of achievement, and seeing projects through from start to finish, as well as building out the creative industries in Mexico.

Raul is intentional about measuring the organization’s impact. Working with his team and with external evaluators, he has compiled a large body of qualitative testimonials, where students, families, and even librarians have spoken to changes in their views of creativity, reading, music and their own identity. He has recorded the multitude of students who, with the skills and inspiration they learned working with Germinalia, have gone on to different universities and to win awards. Similarly, Ingenio’s students have gone on to participate in international youth conferences, intercultural educational exchanges, youth entrepreneurship contests, and to the best universities and conservatories, where they have won prizes in their studies ranging from music composition to biology, economics and chemistry. Raul records their experiences as evidence of the life-changing empowerment that this new way of critical thinking can provide. He also works with a number of external evaluators, mostly universities in Chiapas, to constantly study and improve the methods at the hives so that participants and facilitators are changing their mindset. Raul believes that this sort of measurement is critical in order to build a strong case that this type of methodology belongs in public policy.

For years, Raul has worked closely with foundations and organizations to fund Germinalia and El Ingenio, including but not limited to Urban Youth Fund UN-Habitat, PNUD, Ford Foundation, W.K.Kellogg Foundation, Fundación Metlife, Fundación SM, Iberbibliotecas-CERLAC, Indesol, CONACULTA, FONCA, DIF Chiapas, UNACH, CIDE, and Fondeib. In the future, revenue from Germinalia’s social business will also serve to support Raul’s work.

During 2013, El Ingenio benefitted about 1200 people, and since its founding in 2004 the center has worked with a total of 6000 beneficiaries. In 2013 and 2014 Raul installed 9 different hives in public locations in Chiapas and Mexico City with an approximate number of 600 beneficiaries each annually. El Ingenio’s attendants have produced nine CDs and published 5 books, in addition to two illustrated children’s books. The center’s participants have also designed and built three green buildings out of recycled materials. Germinalia has received prizes including Premio Recicla México 2012 (Fundación Azteca, Bimbo, SEMARNAT, SEP), Premio Estatal al Voluntariado 2012 (DIF Chiapas) Premio Nacional de Reciclaje de Residuos Sólidos 2011 (COPARMEX-SEMARNAT-CONAGUA) and Premio UVM 2008, among others.

In the coming years, Raul will work to expand the hive model for public spaces, but his plan is not that of a franchise. Rather, he plans to work with local and national governments and other organizations to apply his methodology of creative social development to both public spaces and the public education system all across Mexico. Aside from his team’s work in training 5000 educators across Mexico, Raul has worked to support a number of government causes. Working alongside a network of other organizations, he helped during the Colectiva Causas Ciudadanas in 2010 and 2011 to incorporate cultural and athletic activities into the traditional educational curriculum. He has also served as coordinator for an educational UNICEF program in Chiapas. A critical motivation for carefully measuring the impact of the hives is Raul’s determination to have evidence to bring before educational planners in Mexico. With strong results about the impact of these creative and participatory learning approaches, he believes he will be better positioned to collaborate with governments and truly shift mindsets. He intends to continue catalyzing creativity in communities and schools until everywhere in Mexico has been inspired by possibility.

Growing up, Raul Mendoza was exposed to a wealth of alternative and creative education. His parents had both been a part of the 1968 protest movement in Mexico City, and raised him with a strong value of both alternative thought and education itself. Raul attended the first Frenet primary school in Mexico, Escuela Activa, where he learned in an environment of creativity and dialogue. When he was twelve, Raul built his first invention, a steam engine for a school project. He grew up with the vision that he would be an engineer like his hero, Leonardo Da Vinci. But when he first enrolled in an engineering program at university, he found the program to be stifling, preventing the students from any form of independent creation or innovation. He switched to studying music, where he found the creative freedom that the industrial engineering program lacked.

At the age of 16, Raul had begun spending his summers participating in rural literacy campaigns in the Mexican countryside. The program was formative for Raul; first, because he had the opportunity to for the first time apply his own creative skills to the teaching process, and second because it exposed him to the massive social challenges of rural Mexico. Raul found himself asking why adult literacy programs were necessary in the first place. Every town in Chiapas had a school: what was going wrong with the public education system if adults were still illiterate? Working closely with the town’s youth, he found that they considered the public education system meaningless, because it had nothing to do with their daily life in rural communities.

Inspired by his experience in Chiapas, Raul felt called to work in education. He finished his degree in music and pursued a Masters in political science and international relations. After receiving his degree, he began to work with a number of different projects, experimenting with the idea of bringing creative cultural education into daily life, rather than having it limited to inaccessible spaces such as concert halls that require expensive tickets. In one successful project which ran for several years, he and his friends transformed a public trolley bus into a cultural experience. Unknowing passengers would board the trolley to get to work or the store, and find themselves in an art gallery with live music and one-on-one conversations with the artists. It was through this experience that Raul realized there was power in transforming public spaces.

Raul was then invited by a community public school in Chiapas to transform their traditional way of educating. He worked to adapt solutions to some of the problems he had experienced during the literacy campaigns, bringing his students out into the fields as often as possible, and forging connections between their experiences in the classroom and their daily realities. It was around this time that he committed himself full time to the concept of rural social development in Chiapas. In 2004, Raul founded Germinalia, with the goal of developing a normative project in cultural development, education, and sustainable development. In 2006, under Germinalia’s umbrella, Raul and a cohort of friends founded Ingenio, originally designed as a center for educational and psychological support for university students in San Cristobal because they discovered that many of the young people from the rural school they helped design were struggling to succeed once they made it to university. As Ingenio developed, though, Raul still felt like something was missing in the way the center supported Chiapas’s youth. They were trying to help young people fit into the system, rather than the other way around. Raul decided a different model for education was needed. He and his team believed that if they could open the door and empower young people to see their own possibility, they would begin to see a transformation in their lives.

They decided to shift the focus of Ingenio to empowering Chiapas’s young people to use their creative abilities for their own advancement. The center became a full-fledged, free-access creative space, with a 5000-volume library, workshops in music production, informational sessions on social services, and dynamic learning communities. Raul began working with other communities in the area to develop his “hive” idea for the similar use of public spaces. Today, Raul’s project has grown with his expertise. Ingenio continues to be the base for his creative learning model, but the program has widely expanded to include a network of committed community spaces, all fostering creativity and empowerment. Raul is working to spread his methodology of creativity to Mexico’s entire population.