2021-2022 Centers that change, change your center

Solidarity Purpose of the Campaign:

The Itaka-Escolapios network contributes to supporting educationally, pastorally, and economically, twenty-nine Piarist educational centers located in Bolivia, Cameroon, Gabon, India, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, and Venezuela.

All funds raised during the “centers that change, change your center” campaign will contribute to the sustainability of these educational centers, so that they can continue to change, transforming the students, educators, (teachers, instructors, catechists, etc.) families, and the environment of the schools.

Centres of the itaka-Escolapios network

Educational centres

Campaign goals:

To understand and support the educational, pastoral, and transformative work of the twenty-nine schools that the Itaka-Escolapios network supports.
To contribute to covering the ordinary expenses of the Piarist schools supported by the Itaka-Escolapios network for their viability.
To highlight and promote the transforming character of the Piarist centers.
Contribute to all the Piarist centers, which carry out the campaign, to review their transformative character, and take steps forward to become more Piarist-like centers, more transformative centers.
To offer the Educa Itaka-Escolapios network as a network of educational centers for social transformation.

Campaign slogan: “Centers that change, change your center”:

The campaign slogan can be vey suggestive, facilitate the work of various projects, and have several meanings depending on the language in which you use.

We provide you with several approaches to the slogan and, therefore, to the activities of the campaign:

One approach. “Centers that change”. Conveys the idea that the Piarist educational centers change and transform people and their environment.
Another approach. “Centers that change”. The Piarist centers themselves (schools, boarding schools, socio-educational centers, etc.) must change internally, they must be updated, they must be more and more like Piarist centers, more and more transformative centers, etc.)
Another approach. “Change your center”: It challenges teachers, students, religious, families, and instructors to collaborate in the change, in the transformation of their center (school, parish, etc.).
Another approach. “Centers that change, change your center”: From a more vital approach, the slogan invites us to change our center. It is an invitation to raise our gaze, to go out into our locality, to go out to the periphery, to decenter ourselves. In this sense, the slogan wants to be an invitation to look from another perspective, to change the center from which we often see things (our center= our navel).
Another approach. “Change your center”: Jesus came to change our center. Throughout history, many people have been able to decenter themselves to the point of giving their life for others. Turn the scale of values upside down: the last shall be the first, and the first last, as Mark’s Gospel tells us.
Another approach: “Change your center”: This is an alert, a continuous warming, even for professionals with a long career in education, or in solidarity issues. We must not forget the perspective that we are, and are by and for them, the little ones are “our” center.
In addition, the game of the slogan between singular and plural is also suggestive, because there is no global change without personal change. Social change is only possible with committed people.
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Dorotea, new character of the Itaka-Escolapios team.

Her name, Dorotea, reminds us of the place where the great transforming contribution of Calasanz began.

She is an older woman, of advanced age, who brings wisdom and historical perspective.

She is a woman involved in both formal and informal Piarist education.

With this new character, we want to recognize and make a heartfelt tribute to all older people who have devoted much of their lives, in our schools, to transformative education.

Dorotea is also a claim to keep alive those first intuitions of Calasanz in the Roman Trastévere. Dorotea embodies the spirit of the Pious Schools that seek to respond, with creativity, to the needs of children and youth.