Merche Garcia Villatoro

Merche Garcia Villatoro is bringing together key educational institutions to provide a holistic experience for children and youth beyond teaching formal skills, to include values such as empathy, democratic participation, and service. In doing this, Merche assists educational institutions, parents, and communities to understand that education goes far beyond the eight hours a day a child spends at school and involves them as key participants.

Merche is creating alliances with education-related entities—such as local governments, schools and high schools, parent organizations, and citizen organizations (COs)—to create comprehensive education models that include leisure time as a key component to children and youth education. Through a consensus building process that includes assessing needs and available programs, training volunteers and leaders, and creating a center for leisure time activities, she brings these components together to provide youth with a comprehensive education. Merche helps organizations put key competences, such as empathy, leadership, and citizen participation at the core of each activity. Additionally, Merche involves children and youth in planning and carrying out activities, thereby powerfully increasing the transmission of these competences.

In Spain (excluding the region of Catalonia) since there are very few entities using youth’s leisure time as a values-building platform, Merche also uses these alliances to build locally managed youth centers—Esplais—which provide space and activities to train young people about the values needed to be successful in today’s world. She has found, during her 24 years of experience working with youth, that leisure time is an ideal environment to develop children’s and youth’s sense of responsibility, citizenship, identity, integration, and other key concepts that cannot be fully transmitted in a formal school setting. Additionally, to allow access to as many children as possible, Merche applies a scaled pricing scheme to cover the costs for children from underprivileged backgrounds.

One of the differentiating factors in Merche’s model is that all activities are aimed toward solving a social problem of the municipality where the center is located. Thus, each activity the participants propose or plan must include a way to improve the world around them. In doing this, young people acquire a deep sense of citizenship and empathy.

With an average school drop out rate of 30 percent and a quickly increasing percentage of jobless youth (43.8 percent), there is a justified concern for the future of youth in Spain. To add to this concern, coinciding with most Western European countries, there has been a drop in young citizen participation, shown both in low rates of youth voter participation (i.e. lower than 40 percent for ages 18 to 25) as well as few youth-led COs. Many studies show that such high rates of school failure and the lack of interest in citizen participation are not only related, but point to a need to train children in value-based competences—not only skills—from a young age. In fact, the European Union recently established eight competences to be acquired through practice as a framework to rewrite national school curricula. These go beyond math and communication to include interpersonal, intercultural, social and civic competences, as well as critical learning and entrepreneurship. However, a static formal education system is unable to teach these competences, alleging that there is not enough time or qualified professionals to both instill competences and meet national curricular requirements in skills-based learning. Schools, and the time students spend in them, are proving to be insufficient to educate children in all the skills and competences necessary to be successful.

Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy was also a transition from an imposed set of religious values across society to avoiding imposing any particular system of belief. Thus, educators in public schools are generally uncomfortable correcting behavioral problems and are unsure how to instill good citizenship. Recently, the government created a compulsory school subject titled “Education for Citizenship” which attempted to cover this need, but has instead set the stage for a political battle between the governing and opposition party.

Another barrier to providing a comprehensive educational experience for children and youth is a general lack of coordination and networking among the key stakeholders involved in education. Ever changing curricular requirements from the central government have made teachers and school administrators resistant to external influences. Moreover, local governments are generally unfamiliar with their role to provide a fuller education in their local school systems. New laws and regulations at regional, national, and European levels are opening paths for collaboration but there are few taking up the task of coordinating such different groups toward a common goal.

Although there are initiatives aimed to reach kids during leisure time, there are few examples that act as essential complements to formal education. On one hand, many leisure time initiatives are services designed to keep children entertained while their parents are unable to care for them. These are often expensive or when publicly funded, focused on providing a space for sports or other fun activities without much coordination with schools. The organizations that do offer fun value-based activities (e.g. Boy Scouts) tend to serve kids from fairly economically privileged families, which excludes a large amount of the population which have higher rates of school failure. Existing programs aimed to help children improve grades or find a job usually target youth older than 13, which is late to begin instilling values and competences in children.

Merche is developing her model at a local level in different key municipalities in Spain, with the aim of enabling local values-based educational environments for kids to grow up in. To be successful, the model must be fully owned and managed by local stakeholders. She often refers to the saying: “It takes the whole village to educate a child,” and, therefore has developed a very thorough and flexible process to involve key players in creating strong local alliances. To work in a given community she requires full commitment from the mayor, school and high school principals, representatives from parent organizations, and later, local COs.

The process of involving local entities to create and manage a coordinated Esplai consists of a series of steps that slowly convince each group to work together. As representatives from each group (i.e. a mayor, the local youth representative, a principal and a few key people in youth work) becomes a team and acquires a common vision, Merche helps them establish a base of values and, with this common thread in place, structures a series of activities and programs for youth based on these values. Finally, the group decides what kind of center is necessary to both coordinate these activities as well as offer a physical space for their youth. Additionally, Merche gives specific roles to each entity in the group, including participating from the beginning in financing the center they build. Generally, schools recruit students and faculty to plan and participate in activities, high schools recruit volunteers to assist in running the activities, local governments provide the space and one-third of the funding, and COs and parent organizations create a citizen-base to support the activities and spread the word.

After having interviewed close to 60 expert youth workers around the country in depth, identifying needs and key people, Merche is now working in three strategic regions—one has already established a center and is building teams in another seven. The process of involving representatives from local entities includes a series of steps beginning with a visit to a municipality where Esplai is already working. Generally, Merche demonstrates La Florida, the municipality where her center reaches over 900 children per year. She then offers local training courses for youth workers and volunteers and organizes a series of meetings to establish a plan and create a common project that includes what is already available and what needs to be done. Normally, after 9 months, the local alliance will have created a long-term plan and a temporary center to cover additional needs, co-funded by families, businesses, and local and regional governments.

The methodology Merche uses throughout the activities is essential to create a learning environment in the communities where she works. The model consists of placing 10 key values or competences, as the common thread which underlies every activity. These include encouraging social inclusion and avoiding marginalization, entrepreneurial and leadership attitudes, space for democratic participation, local identity, caring for the environment, healthy habits, integrating people with disabilities, reconciling work and school with family time, preventing school failure and accessing the right to educational leisure time. Additionally, every 3 months there is a theme placed around activities, such as “gender equality” or “caring for the environment.” To decide which activities to include and plan, youth workers propose ideas to the participants and volunteers who then choose either to do one of the activities or propose their own activities. Once the participants have decided what they would like to do for the trimester, the youth workers and volunteers help them prepare the activities by walking them through a pre-established planning tool, which includes general goals, specific goals, a budget, and so on. The participants are aware of the 10 key values and must include them in the activity planning, or change the activity. Throughout the process, children and youth learn to plan their own projects, and also deepen their understanding of the key competences while threading them through their projects. During and after the project, volunteers evaluate the progress and results with the participants in order to improve or change the course of the activity if it is not accomplishing what was originally proposed.

For example, a group of teenagers in the Canary Islands—while learning about the importance of recycling—planned a series of recycling parties to raise awareness and set an example of recycling. Their process included engaging their peers at local schools and high schools to present the project, involving faculty to help them understand what happens when one recycles, working with the local government to secure permits for events, and using their activity as a starting point for a recycling campaign. The result was a series of large events at a nearby beach with numerous stakeholders. The events not only raised recycling awareness, but perhaps more important, was the impact they had on the participants; recognized for their hard work and feeling valued for doing something useful for society.

Generally these centers divide children and youth into three groups: Ages 3 to 10, 11 to 14, and 15 to 17. Although some activities are limited to certain age groups, most of the activities mix different ages: The older help the younger or the younger lead the older in a planned activity. There are also activities that involve adults and the elderly; a central component of Esplai is to provide participants with a sense of belonging to a diverse community.

Merche’s unique methodology not only leverages the participants’ learning experience but also serves the community as a whole. Merche often says that a youth center, and any activity it does, must “face the neighborhood,” meaning that everything must be structured to help others in the community. This is the key to the success of participants’ growth, but also to citizen support of the center. As youth, often considered the problem, become the solution to different issues in the community, they gain neighbors trust and trust in Merche’s work. In addition, Merche’s methodology constantly involves parents and other family members in the activities, an essential aspect to consolidate the education processes inside homes as well.

After having worked in the region of Catalonia for many years, Merche has established a coalition reaching over 100 centers that operate under similar principles and serve 60 percent of youth. She has refined a working model to spread the essence of her work to the rest of Spain. Already Merche has created alliances in three regions around Spain (i.e. close to Toledo, Sevilla, and the Canary Islands), and one is managing its own center. Her goal is to have examples in 10 autonomous communities in the next five years and to build a network of Esplais that work regionally and nationally. Once this network is functioning, Merche believes that they will be able to slowly transform policies and mindsets to understand education as a process that includes leisure time as an essential learning space, as well as involve the whole community.

Merche has been a key figure in youth and child development work in Spain for 24 years. She created her own leisure time education center, La Florida Esplai, in a suburb of Barcelona. Merche was one of the most active founders of Esplai Federation, which has held over 100 youth related entities in the region of Catalonia alone, and is the driving force behind its growth and spread. A key part of her work with the federation has consisted in finding the levers that have made some centers successful.

While working with youth and children, Merche spent a good amount of time spreading key programs to other centers belonging to the Federation in Catalonia, and working with partners in Spain. During these processes, Merche found that there seemed to be no specific initiative that leveraged leisure time to empower youth with empathy and citizenship. Surprised that no one seemed to have even attempted to take on this challenge, in 2007 Merche began meeting with experts in youth work throughout the 17 Spanish autonomous communities. After talking to nearly 60 experts and people working in the field, she concluded that no organizations were focusing specifically on preventing school and civic failure in children from a young age. Soon after, she put a plan together and began building a team to launch pilot models that applied the key principles she had discovered were successful in positively influencing and enabling youth.

In addition to her work on the ground, Merche has been involved in influencing regional and national policies and other key stakeholders concerning non-formal education. In addition to a brief stint establishing a youth policy with the government of her home city, she has presided over a series of regional and national boards and federations concerning youth and children. Merche’s passion is to see a complete transformation in the national conception of education to include many more people and leisure time as essential pieces of a child’s educational experience.