ESE:O was founded with critical vision towards gender inequality and the exclusion and discrimination of groups and peoples historically excluded from legitimate social recognition, such as women, children and youth, indigenous peoples, sexual minorities, activists and researchers in sexual and reproductive rights, and artists.

The promotion of teaching and writing competencies through democratic literacy is directly tied to the construction of a new citizen who is capable of naming, denouncing and defending their rights. ESE:O seeks to promote educational leadership founded on a personal and intimate use of language that allows us to know, to remember and to validate our own experiences, making us protagonists of our own learning experience and leaders of civic participation. Democratic literacy is an innovative strategy that utilizes language as a tool through which we build our own worlds and access power, knowledge, dignity and overall, citizenship.

The ESE:O methodology seeks to promote writing as a collaborative process which involves many different actors, and as an opportunity for participants to create collaborative written work that best represent them. Those who are involved become conscience of their own personal voice, and moreover, learn to replicate and perform this new competency in a way in which they can teach others. This model, which transfers teaching and leadership competencies and fosters a multiplying effect, is called “training of trainers.”

ESE:O believes that written culture, the arts and memory are key to developing democracy and respect for human rights. In bringing visibility to historically silenced voices, it is then possible to recover social legitimacy. This action is fundamental to the development of a fully democratic society.