Casita para la Vida empowers displaced Caribbean families to build healthy homes while healing collective trauma. Our participatory toolkit integrates self-construction with memory recovery, creating resilient communities from the ground up

The idea in more detail

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Other facts:

• Category: Environmental health, Digital inclusion and responsible use of technology, Healthy aging and elderly care
• Current stage of the idea: MVP: You have a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and started testing it in the market.
• ­Who is submitting: Rosaleda Reynoso
• Country: Dominican Republic

Main challenges in the development and implementation of your idea

1. Epistemic Translation Barriers
The biggest challenge is bridging different knowledge systems. Residents operate through sophisticated but tacit spatial knowledge—rules that are practiced, not spoken. Architects and authorities often cannot decode this community spatial language, while residents struggle to articulate their expertise in terms that formal planning processes recognize. This creates "epistemic disjuncture" where genuine collaboration fails despite good intentions.
2. Institutional Resistance
Municipal authorities lack frameworks for recognizing non-codified expertise. Building codes and planning regulations actively criminalize many informal construction practices that demonstrate superior environmental and social response. Authorities often mandate "improvements" that residents recognize as technically inferior to existing solutions.
3. Scaling While Maintaining Authenticity
The model's strength lies in deep cultural immersion and sustained community relationships. Scaling beyond pilot communities risks losing this authenticity if the process becomes standardized or externally imposed rather than genuinely community-led.
4. Digital Divide in Marginalized Communities
Limited internet access and smartphone penetration in target neighborhoods creates barriers to digital platform components. This requires dual physical/digital formats, increasing complexity and costs.
5. Resource Mobilization Without Dependency
Balancing external support (materials, technical assistance) while maintaining community ownership and avoiding creating aid dependency relationships that undermine the project's empowerment goals.
6. Long-term Sustainability
The participatory methodology requires sustained facilitator presence and ongoing relationship-building, making it resource-intensive compared to one-time infrastructure interventions that many funders prefer.

Expectations from the challenge

Practical feedback on scaling challenges from other social entrepreneurs who've faced similar issues moving from local success to broader implementation.
Business model clarity through the workshops - I need concrete guidance on sustainable funding that doesn't compromise community control or create dependency relationships.
Technical support for the digital platform component, specifically addressing low smartphone penetration and unreliable internet in target communities.
Impact measurement tools that can demonstrate health outcomes to institutional funders while remaining meaningful to communities who define wellness differently than medical frameworks.
Network connections with health professionals who understand community-based approaches and can validate our methodology without requiring it to fit conventional clinical models.
Honest assessment of whether our approach can realistically scale beyond Dominican communities given the deep cultural knowledge and sustained relationship-building it requires.

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