Fe y Alegría recognizes the person as a unique and unrepeatable being, but at the same time in relation with and for others. Each person is a subject of rights: to protection, education, good treatment, harmonious and integral development. The formation of the personhood of the student is the center of the educational task. An educational task that strengthens their identity, their self-esteem and the discovery and realization of all their potential.
Fe y Alegría chooses to direct its educational action to people and communities forgotten by the state and society. It prefers to walk alongside the poor, excluded, marginalized, and those violated in their dignity to promote social justice and contribute to the change of economic, political and social structures that generate injustice. This principle invites us to permanently rethink the role of the educative institution in order to give pertinent, creative and innovative responses.
Fe y Alegría understands education as a process of social transformation that promotes the empowerment of disadvantaged people and communities, through the exchange of knowledge and experiences so that they themselves can create, produce, solve problems, develop ideas, and generate knowledge; in co-responsibility with other actors in the community, generating alliances and networks to contribute to the solution of problems and the advancement of the common good.
Through the integral education provided by Fe y Alegría, special attention is paid to three fundamental aspects of human formation: faith formation, ethical formation and citizenship formation. It strengthens personal ethics committed to the development of oneself, care for others and responsibility for one’s own actions and their consequences; it is committed to an education that trains for the exercise of full citizenship and the awareness that we are all children of the same father, deserving of a dignified life.
For Fe y Alegría, inclusive and intercultural education is a right and a matter of justice and equality. There exists a social debt toward native peoples, disabled persons, women, and migrants. Inclusive and intercultural education must traverse society as a whole, because only in this way can we contribute to the formation of empowered and free people who value and live out plurality.
Fe y Alegría forms people with awareness and respect for their dignity, capable of demanding and exercising their rights, and who value work as a means of personal and community fulfillment. The worker is a worker insofar as he/she transforms and produces a type of society and not only products or services for economic benefit.
In this sense, no one can remain on the sidelines of the development of technological competencies required by a world in permanent transformation.
In the face of the socio-environmental crisis, Fe y Alegría’s commitment is to contribute to the construction of alternative models of life, economically, politically, socially and environmentally, changing the anthropocentric vision to orient ourselves towards living well, with a sustainable human development that ensures a dignified life for all people.
