HELLO!
Welcome and thanks for visiting my site! I invite you to take a moment and look around. To learn more about my background, experience, skills and how we could potentially work together. Simply contact me.
HELLO! HOLA! HEJ! E AÍ?
My name is Rodolfo Zúñiga and I’m on a life learning journey looking for new endeavours in life.
I am a citizen of the world with roots both in Costa Rica and Sweden, with a formal education in Social Anthropology, Archaeology, Human Rights and Education for Peace. Now I am looking deeper into how to combine my current experience with design thinking, digital transformation and experiential learning.
My life learning journey starts as a child in Costa Rica being most of the time at home building Lego and playing with Star Wars toys during the 80s. I have then moved on to excavating the past in Costa Rica through my own consulting firm and later own comprehending indigenous communities and their cultural manifestation. At some point I focused on how cultural heritage can be a tool to reinforce and validate the role of citizens in societies. I developed much of those ideas working within CISV - a peace education organisation. This led to my interested in human rights and education for peace, learning about how creative communities can be made throughout developing a common ground of values and rules to follow together. This also inspired me to co-create a non for profit organisation and to work in Save the Children Sweden and its grassroots movement.
During the last five years I've been developing new knowledge and skills about design (design strategies, UX design, interaction design, service design, human centered design, etc) and also a big interest to learn about new technologies and data.
I am looking for a position or the opportunity to lead teams in their process to design new products/plattforms/movements,
creating outcomes for better societies. I lead teams by driving change, not with old school classic management, but rather by developing and nourishing a collective intelligence. I like to call this a pluricultural network of interactions, meaning the possibility to drive change based on the interactions happening between peoples personalities, expertise, skills, learning, values and feelings.
I had recently the opportunity to read “Compendium for the civic economy” from 00 Architects. One of the behaviours for the civic economy gave me the words to describe my purpose:
I am (…) focused on generating a holistic experience of place - creating places that tell stories about their purpose, often surprising and delighting users and helping to generate open conditions for people´s participation and collaboration.
My work and everyday life is grounded in human rights and the believe that we human kind can take care and solve our planet challenges. I lead teams by creating a culture of friendship and creativity. This is achieved by cooking together, learning throughout an anthropological perspective, using tools as digital storytelling, designing workshops to co create, etc.
SHOWCASE
SAFE PLACE APP - SAVE THE CHILDREN & USTWO NORDICS
In 2019 Rädda Barnen (Save the Children Sweden) partnered with ustwo to design and build Safe Place, a meditation app specifically designed for refugee children and youth that provides simple and practical exercises that therapists use in the treatment of PTSD and anxiety. The app aims to ease both acute, immediate needs and to support continuous self-care. I am very proud to be able to enable this cooperation and being part of the creative team developing the app.
REROUTE
ReRoute is a company founded by my wife and I some years ago. We are professionals within social anthropology, human rights, education for peace and communication for development, with many years of experience working in the non-for profit sector. We have been mostly focused on working with youth, active citizenship and human rights organisations, which have a warm place in our hearts. We are global professionals acting local and vice versa, with one foot in Sweden, and the other one taking the next step to other places in the world. We do believe Sweden is in the world, but the world is also in Sweden. This applies to every single nation and country in the world.
Together with digital storytelling we are specialists in many other learning methodologies, both digital and analog. We enjoy the most to work with experiential learning. Through experiential learning methods and activities we develop trust-full relationships with our partners and clients in order to create groundbreaking processes, structures and concrete solutions for them, and for the society. We are passioned to find new routes for society to grow holistically sustainable.
We want to keep ourselves out of the mainstream. We don´t promote our work with ads or portfolios. We don´t actually have a website. Most of our cooperations are made throughout our network and connections created by our outcomes.
As part of this cooperation proposal, we can tell you that ReRoute has been cooperating, developing relationship and building community, with organisations such as Youth for Understanding Europe,The Belgian Red Cross, Arigatou International, The National Youth Council of Swedish Organisations, and the Swedish Institute. We have been facilitating workshops, sharing stories, creating platforms, developing learning methods and laughing with participants and volunteers from Guatemala City to Bangkok, from Dar es Salaam to Luleå.
MOSQUITO TACTICS
This is a book based on my masters degree paper on Peace Education and Human Rights. The book is giving a theorethical ground to define their educational purpose as organisation. The goal was to write CISV´s manifest! This gave the possibility to all CISV members in 55 different countries to have a common ground for communication, working and developing of programs and activities.
The book was also a great tool for promoting CISV to external audiences. It was released in CISV annual international meeting in Guatemala in 2009. A film and a trailer were also produced in order to have a stronger impact during the launching and distribution of the book.
VÄL - VI ÄR LANDSKRONA
My wife and I co founded VäL (Vi är Landskrona = We are Landskrona) as a non-profit organisation aiming to inspire people living in Landskrona and invite them to participate in a multitude of stimulating and rewarding cultural activities, on the basis of common interests rather than background, gender and nationality. These activities create a meeting ground for Landskrona citizens from near and from far, and provide a basis for dialogue and cooperation. This allows in turn a discussion about values to take place, and constituted therefore an important element in the integration work in Landskrona.
One of VäLs main projects was LA Stories, a three years project using Digital Storytelling as a digital method to build community within Landskrona´s youth. By creating their own story films, youth had the opportunity to talk about their life, experiences and dreams and how these connect them with other citizens in their city creating a positive social identity for their social and personal development.
The president of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Jan Eliasson promoted VäLs work in 2012 (video in Swedish).
MY EXPERIENCE
Background & Expertise
OPERATIONS DEVELOPMENT OFFICER AT SAVE THE CHILDREN SWEDEN
Jan 2016 - present
Working together with local chapters and its people in their strategic planning, operations development with focus on designing recruiting campaigns, active communication within the movement, advocacy in children's rights. My main task is to create the conditions to offer Save the Children local chapters as plattforms for social innovation. A good example of this is Designing for Children’s Rights (D4CR Malmö) in the south of Sweden. This is a multidisciplinary network of professionals focusing on using children’s rights in designing more ethical services and products affecting children’s lives.
REROUTE. OWNER & CO FOUNDER
2009 - present
ReRoute is a company designing learning workshops, activities, lectures and projects with focus on digital storytelling, human rights, active citizenship and community design.
REGIONAL COORDINATOR, SAVE THE CHILDREN SWEDEN
2012 - 2016
Project management of the project “Det handlar om kärlek” in the south of Sweden. The project is offering human rights education to youth at secondary schools in Sweden, whom are victims of violence and crimes based on family honour. The project is a cooperation modell between civil society, the Swedish Government and municipalities.
CO-FOUNDER, PROJECT MANAGER VÄL NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION SWEDEN
2009 - 2012
Project leader designing and implementing “LA Stories” initiative and by using digital storytelling as a pedagogical visual tool to work with youth as agents of change in the Swedish society. Digital storytelling is a digital platform for youth to share their life stories and to discover how we are interconnected in the globalised world.
PROJECT MANAGER, CISV SWEDEN.
2008-2010
Project Manager developing “Mosquito Tactics. A book about education for peace”. Using peace education as a theoretical framework, the book is a theoretical and practical tool to help people become active global citizens. Mosquito Tactics is inspired by my own master thesis about peace education and how it can be used as a concrete paradigm for organisations to work with the development of a culture of peace.
FREELANCER CONSULT IN ARCHAEOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY COSTA RICA.
2000 - 2005
Developing and implementing archaeological research and evaluation of private properties for international developers as Intel, Price Smart, Marriot Hotells. As a social anthropologist I performed several ethnographical studies about how rural communities use their cultural heritage as a way to shape their social identities.
EDUCATION
MASTER CLASS DIGITAL ACCELERATION. 2015. HYPER ISLAND. STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN.
FROM IDEAS TO ACTION. 2017. IDEO & NOVO ED. E-LEARNING COURSE.
MA IN HUMAN RIGHTS AND EDUCATION FOR PEACE. 2005 - 2006. NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA.
BACHELOR IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY. 1995 - 2000. UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA.
EDUCATION ET DROIT INTERNATIONAL DES DROITS DE L ́HOMME, 39ÉME SESSION ANNUELLE D ́ENSEIGNEMENT. 2008. STRASBOURG, FRANCE.
LET´S CONNECT!
Please get in touch if you would like to talk more about my work or in general have a chat about life and future opportunities to co-create together.
In words of Esko Kilpi, if a modern definition of work is “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction” then “The really big idea (...) is to reconfigure agency in a way that brings relationships into the center. The mission is to see action within relationships.”
In the end, the transformation of society can´t be done without us human beings having empathy towards each other. Storytelling, our power to communicate and connect to each other through feelings and memories, is our greatest tool!
Thank you for your time. I leave you with my everyday bike commuting playlist. Enjoy and hope to meet you soon!
