Rural Laboratories of Social Entrepreneurship: A Sociocybernetics Approach

The Rural Laboratories of Social Entrepreneurship, of the Colombian NGO Future for Children, is an educational program directed to rural inhabitants or suburban areas of small and medium municipalities who have not suffered directly from the armed conflict and have low human development indices. The objective is to strengthen personal and technical skills that allow them to identify the problems, wealth and opportunities of their environments; recognize their potential and define their life project; and partner to self-manage initiatives that promote a relevant and sustainable development for their communities. In 2017, four laboratories were held at Colombian Antioquia department with young peasants, mostly out of school. The experience has led to a research that seeks to understand, from systems theory, how laboratories confront young people with their limits of knowledge about themselves and their environment, and how in collective they construct new knowledge and make social decisions that trigger emerging processes that influence their personal and community development. The paper presents and explains the model of this system, which includes the process of observation of the participants, and makes a reflection from a Sociocybernetics perspective that seeks to understand how Laboratories can facilitate that young people understand their environment and act upon it to co-create a new rurality.