Kelly Juliana Valencia López

Kelly Juliana Valencia López, Social Worker & Community Leader, was born on May 3, 1987, in the Las Estancias neighborhood, Comuna 8, Medellín, Colombia. She currently resides in Florida, United States. She is a Social Worker, graduated from the University of Antioquia. Since 1996, she has been engaged in social, organizational, cultural, and youth processes in the city of Medellín.

Kelly began her social engagement working as an assistant at the local church and with the MIDAS group. During this experience, she started developing her leadership skills and felt encouraged to participate in more community activities, such as community gatherings and recreational activities in her neighborhood “blocks.” At the age of 14, she joined a non-profit organization, where she initially worked as an assistant in the dance and theater workshops offered to the community. In 2005, she became a Reading Promoter, obtaining her first job at the age of 18. As Kelly continued her work with the organization, her leadership stood out among her peers, and she was called upon to represent the organization at the local planning commission and in the city’s participatory budgeting spaces. The organization gained citywide visibility for six consecutive years through her representation. Due to her exceptional leadership skills and decision-making capacity, she became one of the most visible female leaders in her territory and was invited to work with the organization CEDECIS.

While continuing her work with the non-profit organization, Kelly assumed the role of youth promoter for CEDECIS in the PP Joven project in collaboration with Metrojuventud (2011). At this stage, she began projecting youth-related issues citywide while continuing to work as a promoter in various projects with these

organizations. During this time, she was also invited to participate in the work of the organization Visión Consultores, where she contributed to the construction and consolidation of the Youth Network AR-T C8 (Youth Network Art Comuna 8). Kelly continues to be part of this Youth Network, where she learned to value the

importance of belonging to a strong group of friends with whom she could work, play, study, and learn at the same time.

Her ability to strengthen youth processes, her passion for community work, and her vocation for social work were recognized by the non-profit organization, which led her to assume the role of director; her five-year cycle as director ended in 2016. In 2011, she participated as a facilitator of the Pazalobien methodology developed by Fundación Mi Sangre; she later became a facilitator of this methodology in Medellín and Cali. In 2013, Kelly and other community leaders from Comuna 8 participated in what they called “sessions for life and social equity,” with the objective of rebuilding the community’s social fabric and recovering the House of Culture— a space that had been occupied by different armed actors, including the police, but was intended for community use. It was through this process that Kelly had the opportunity to learn how to identify the foundations of a social problem, generate alternative solutions, evaluate them, and implement them—an experience through which she learned how to build a successful social intervention.

In 2014, Kelly participated in a CMM (Coordinated Management of Meaning) workshop conducted by professors from Columbia University. This experience made her work, and that of her community peers, visible at an international level, which led to her invitation to participate in the 17th Annual Global Conference of the

International Leadership Association, held in Barcelona, Spain. Her experience as a woman working in social processes has strengthened her leadership skills and, above all, her ability to respect diversity and work

collaboratively with others. Kelly worked with AC4 (Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity) as a monitor of youth-related issues in the city of Medellín.