Messengers of Peace, through the Emancipate program, has helped some 1,200 young people living in Canary Islands to face their adult life since this project began to operate in 2018. It is an initiative that responds to young people from all the Islands, although the work teams are physically located in Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Since its creation, they have responded to 1,200 young people throughout the Canary Islands, whom they have accompanied to take their first steps into adult life. Currently, they work with 105 young people in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and with another 108 in the province of The Palms.
Andrea Gorostiza is the coordinator of the Emancipate Program in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. It is a preparation program for independent living based on comprehensive intervention and guiding young people to provide them with personal skills that facilitate their individual process. It is aimed at people between the ages of 17 and 21 who have had or have some protection measure, such as family or residential care, adoption, a risk situation or shelter for unaccompanied foreign minors.
It is also a multidisciplinary project in which social workers and educators participate, among other profiles, and whose final objective is for the young participants to achieve full socio-labor insertion because “without that autonomy, it is difficult to emancipate.” This is stated by Gorostiza, who indicates that “while the children are minors they are very protected by the system but when they turn 18 they are lost, although the difference is only one day between when they have assistance and no longer.”
Thus, Emancípate accompanies the young participants in daily tasks as varied as the renewal of the DNI, the accompaniment to a medical check-up, an administrative procedure or the active search for a home and employment so that “young people know the resources that have and thus be able to bring them closer to the community of which they are part” so that, during the two years that this program lasts, “they have all the tools and resources that they will need in their adult life and no longer need the figure of a educator”.
Each of the young people who come to this program have a totally different situation and that is why totally individualized interventions are carried out. “Each of the situations we encounter is different and the children’s lives change a lot over the course of a month, that’s why we adapt to them,” says Andrea Gorostiza, who nevertheless adds that the program also has activities group activities of different kinds, such as workshops, visits to companies and leisure projects. Gorostiza highlights the importance of these collective activities especially for young foreigners, who inevitably get together due to their country of origin and it is necessary for them to interact with the rest of their classmates.
The young Mor Mbengue is 20 years old and has been part of this project for a year and a half, when he was still living in a sheltered apartment in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. At that time, he did not have a residence permit, but this support program has helped him precisely to obtain these documents and also to obtain a job, which has also allowed him to access the rental of an apartment that he currently shares with to two other friends.
Mbengue is Senegalese and arrived in the Canary Islands when he was 17 years old. It was a year later when he came into contact with Messengers of Peace and this project that “has changed my life,” he says. Currently, the young Senegalese is a mediator in a juvenile center because when he came into contact with the Emancípate team he was clear that what he wanted was to help other young people who found themselves in the same situation in which he had state. His good experience in this support program makes the young man one hundred percent recommend this initiative to other people who, like him, need support in different facets of his life. His experience is the best example that receiving help at a precise moment can change a person’s life.
