By Sarah Twombly

Oscar Santiago Uribe Rocha is Medellin, Colombia’s first Chief Resilience Officer (CRO)—the second CRO appointed anywhere in the world. His story is one of personal resilience, determination, and a vision compelling enough to bring world leaders together from across continents to address some of the most pressing shocks and stresses of our time.

For nearly half his life, Rocha has traveled between Colombia and South Africa, ferrying knowledge, support, and international delegations along with him. When he first arrived in Johannesburg as an exchange student in 1997, he did not expect to find a country from which he could learn so much, or to which he had so much to give.

It seems fitting that the world’s second CRO would come to the table with an intimate understanding of how one city can learn from another.

A HISTORY OF EXCHANGE

Medellin, like Johannesburg, has been shaped by a history of violence. Both cities face significant inequality. Both are determined to turn a troubled past into a bright future. In Pretoria, Johannesburg and Medellin, Rocha worked with youth and other vulnerable populations, searching for new ways to ensure the violence and trauma of one generation would not be passed on to the next. He traveled between Colombia and South Africa “exchanging ideas and projects about childhood and children’s rights.”

The Ambassador and he were appointed by the former Columbian President to learn about the peace and reconciliation process that was happening in South Africa, and what it looked like a decade after its implementation. At that time, we in Medellin were preparing our society to enter a post-conflict era.” Rocha’s work, developing programs devoted to the psychological recovery of children, was inextricably tied to the peace process. Having implemented programs in both South Africa and Colombia, he was uniquely positioned to facilitate a larger-scale knowledge exchange between the two countries.

In 2007, Rocha was appointed Administrative Assistant in charge of Cultural and Economic Affairs at the Embassy of Colombia in the Republic of South Africa. “I had been asked both to learn from South Africa, and to help South Africa learn from us in Colombia.”

Over the next several years, Rocha had the opportunity to meet and learn from Nelson Mandela and Roelf Meyer—Peace adviser and former Minister of Constitutional Order under President Nelson Mandela. He formed delegations that brought Desmond Tutu, former president de Klerk, the mayor of Johannesburg, the mayor of Port Elizabeth, the secretary of transportation in Cape Town, and the secretary of transportation from the national government to Colombia.

“While South Africa had developed innovative solutions in the peace process,” Rocha explained, “Medellin had developed solutions on how to improve urban development.”

Rocha lead five delegations from South Africa to Medellin. “We showed them our metros, our gondolas, our child centers,” Rocha says. “It strengthened the ties between Colombia and South Africa.”

Before the institution of these delegations, Medellin had been without a true post-conflict plan. It took sitting down and speaking with South African leaders to begin to see a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. “Like South Africa had done, we had to accept that we had made mistakes,” Rocha explains. “We had to find ways to acknowledge the past without getting stuck there. We needed to look forward and think in terms of the future.”

Rocha returned to Medellin after nearly ten years in South Africa to accept a job as the city’s Director of Social Innovation. In this role he continued his work with youth by researching the sexual and reproductive health of Medellin’s younger population, and continued to facilitate knowledge sharing with other delegations from South Africa.

Then, everything changed....Continue Reading

> via 100resilientcities.rockefellerfoundation.org