Associazione Giovanile Mapuche

“Mapuche” is an apolitical youth association, free and open to everybody, born most of all to release voluntary work culture and expand the knowledge of environmental, artistic and solidarity culture through exchanges and contacts between people and associations.

The association was born from a group of people whose involvement in the territory has become the symbol of a new attention to environmental and social issues. Young people who want to spread their devotion to the same issues through participation, initiatives sharing and cultural exchanges fed by enthusiasm and positiveness.
A group of volunteers who strongly believe in the power of cooperation and wish to open their active work passion to those who want to contribute to present - small and big - challenges, first of all environmental issues and support to self-development.

“Mapuche” was born with the following specific goals:
• Spreading voluntary culture among young/adult people;
• Extending the knowledge of solidarity, environmental and artistic culture thought contacts between people and organizations;
• Expanding educators’ formative horizons, as well as teachers’ and social workers’ in voluntary and environmental fields, in order to make them able to transmit the concepts of love and respect for environment as a relevant value for society and single persons themselves;
• Making itself an aggregation point based on different cultural interests through the idea of “lifelong learning”;
• Promoting the concept of European Active Citizenship.

Why “Mapuche”

Mapuche are the original Amerindian inhabitants of Central and Southern Chile and Southern Argentina (Kingdom of Araucanìa and Patagonia). The name derives from the fusion of two terms: Mapudungun, meaning "People" and Mapu, “of the Earth."

Mapuche people have an agriculture based economy. Their social organization is developed on enlarged households, under the direction of a “lonko”, or chief. In fact they are a varied ethnic entity composed by many different groups sharing the same social, religious and economic structure, as well as a common linguistic inheritance. Mapuche people successfully withstood a lot of subjugating efforts by the Inca Empire, even if they did not have a state-government organization. They even fought against “conquistadores” and, using Bìo-Bìo river as a natural border, they succeeded in withstand the colonization attempts from 1500 to 1800.
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We chose “Mapuche” as our Association name in order to emphasize our closeness to the homeland, to the places from which we wish to make our activity start. Our association wants to embody the spirit of “People of the Earth”, in the double meaning of devotion to the territory and attention to the value of exchanges between people and cultures of the World. “People of the World”, without borders nor divisions, just undertones and realities to be undestood.