Historical Outline
	Justification
	Operational Aims
	General Aims

Historical Outline:
CONVIVEN is a non-profit, non-governmental social organization that promotes the comprehensive social-communitary development of children, teenagers, youths and families, who live in one of the well-known shantytowns in Capital Federal.
"Ciudad Oculta", located near the neighborhoods "Mataderos" and "Villa Lugano", is a place where about ten thousand people live in a situation of acute poverty and isolation.
Conviven was founded in 1994 by Valmir S. Vieira, a Protestant Church missionary who is still the director today. Although he started working from the inside of the shantytown in 1994, since 1998 the Center officially has been located at Martiniano Leguizamón 2974, 50 meters away from "Ciudad Oculta". The activities that are performed consist of comprehensive tasks to serve fellow man as an expression of God´s will for a Christian life. The people that belong to CONVIVEN share and understand that faith should also be put into practice in a precise commitment to the needy. This idea emphasizes the christian mandate that teaches us to take pity, until incarnation, on the people who suffer social injustice, hunger, and discrimination.
We are committed to forming a community that promotes a dignified life for our fellow men. Our aim is to help the needy to develop all the potential God has given them, and to teach them to be able to control better their own environments, lives, and destinies.
CONVIVEN was conceived to help people live as the protagonists of their own experiences and we reject the idea of creating a space for religious or political partisanship.

Justification:
In the last several years, among the many problems that have arisen out of the country’s current social and economic crisis, one of the key issues has been a troubling increase in social marginalization affecting all the generational classes, particularly children, teenagers and youths coming from low-income families. Currently in Argentina 55 infants die each day because of poverty, that is to say, because their basic needs go unsatisfied.
The present situation goes hand in hand with the current deterioration of the individual and familial identity, which in turn leads to a loss of expectations and a restriction in the availability of healthy spaces for childhood and adolescent socialization.

All of this has led to an increase in problems such as leaving school before the legal age, delincuency, infantile and juvenile prostitution, drugs addiction and alcoholism.
In the city of Buenos Aires and its surrounding areas there are nearly 500 shantytowns, in which these problems that stem from acute poverty are very prevalent. In CONVIVEN, we try to provide the people with multiple programs of prevention and care directed at childhood, adolescence and youth in the General Belgrano neighborhood, Shantytown 15, Ciudad Oculta, Lugano, one of the neighborhoods officially designated as a priority area of action. We have taken on the challenge of creating an inclusive recreational, formative, educational space where the children, teenagers and youths of both sexes can be protected and/or reintegrated in schooling, sports, games and social and cultural possibilities that are not common in their lives.

Operational Aims:

*Provide a space for recreational, educational and artistic activities where children, adolescents and youths can spend their free time, can be trained and can be provided with love and food.

* Connect the low-income population with the possibility of recreational experiences in our own space which is destined to be a place to reevaluate social values, understanding, prevention and reintegration, and educational retention.

* Build, together with the young people, a place of membership in their own neighborhood.

* Promote, through this space, a sense of self-confidence, a healthy family criterion and group, family and community membership ties.

* Give the children, adolescents and young people guidance within an educational, formative and recreational field on alternatives to drugs, crime, and prostitution.

*Recreate an educational, formative and labor space through creative and recreational activities that will encourage participants to see themselves as people related to the work field, so that then they can elaborate a new project for their lives.

* Promote internship possibilities through the neighborhood´s networks and through agreements with local companies.

General Aims:
* Give practical love in concrete situations.
* Strengthen friendship and healthy ties.
* State clear and fair limits.
* Create a sense of responsibility.
* Share and rebuild moral and ethical principles.
* Educate in a suitable way.
* Provide vocational training.

***Traducción hecha por: Manuela Suárez***