O CRJ que sonhamos: uma experiência de gestão compartilhada no Centro de Referência das Juventudes de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The history surrounding the construction of the Youth Reference Center of Belo Horizonte (CRJ), a public policy and facility of the City of Belo Horizonte (PBH), involves years of struggles, demands, debates, significant achievements, and numerous confrontations experienced between 2006 and 2016. These events culminated in the occupation of the space by autonomous movements, collectives, groups, and activists from the city and metropolitan region. The youth demanded the opening of the space and the implementation of a shared Management Committee, with equal representation between the public authorities and civil society, to establish the guiding principles of the CRJ. This text presents the results of research aimed at critically reflecting on the first year of management of the CRJ by its democratically elected Management Committee, from the perspective of Participatory Actions and how they defined the conceptual project of the CRJ. It also sought to identify and understand the constitutive elements of the shared management process experienced at the CRJ, as well as its influence on the affective relationships and sense of belonging to the space.To this end, a documentary research was conducted on public and private archive documents, followed by a critical-interpretative reflection on the documents and records of the Youth Reference Center (CRJ), as well as a bibliographic research. The research presents the Youth Reference Center of Belo Horizonte from the collective perspective of a dream: the act of creating and instituting a youth public policy made BY and WITH the youth. Instituted in collective practice, this policy questions the way public spaces of rights are conceived and conducted, establishing a new logic of occupation and management, deconstructing existing rules and protocols in public administration, and instituting a democratic model of space occupation. In this context, Cornelius Castoriadis's (1975) concept of radical imagination conceptualizes the journey of the CRJ Management Committee in the act of conceiving the new, questioning and transcending the existing, imagining and creating other forms of social organization, values, and meanings. This work also analyzes the stages of formulation and implementation of public policies and, in the case of the CRJ, develops the concept of institutional activism as a subtype of creative action, involving acting reflexively and collectively in challenging contexts. The dimension of the collective and the instituting praxis unfolds Félix Guattari's (1972[2004]) concept of transversality as fundamental to escapebinary structures, promoting multiplicity and diversity of connections, essential forinstitutional transformation. This work also seeks to reflect on the dimension of affect and the sense of belonging of the youth occupying the CRJ through non- representational theories and how the connections and interactions between the youth and the CRJ space encouraged the establishment of an environment conducive to the artistic development of young people.