Mum, when I grow up I want to build like you is a documentary about the Conviviality Room Project (Aula de Convivencia) - a self-built community project expanding a public school in the municipality of Dos Hermanas, Seville with Recetas Urbanas, 2017-2019.

• Directed by Juan Gabriel Pelegrina
• Produced by Recetas Urbanas
• Music by Pepe Arce (unasoundmusik.com)
• Translated into English by Elvira Dyangani Ose and Raúl Muñoz de la Vega

More info

Conviviality Room (Aula de Convivencia) is a project born within the fight of a small group of mothers from the Public Nursery & Primary School “Europa” in Montequinto, Dos Hermanas, Seville, reclaiming a lunch room for the school. For eight years, children had been eating in the school library as an interim solution; but the library was so small that they had to do lunch shifts, the last taking place after 4:00pm in the afternoon. The library also thus couldn’t be used as such, and books had to be kept elsewhere.

To address this situation, the mothers of the school set up the “Plataforma Pro-Comedor” (Lunch Room Proponents), in order to seek support and draw attention to the project, with the enduring support of the school headship, the AMPA [Alumni’s mothers and fathers association] and the whole educational community. Thanks to this, they successfully generated greater awareness of the problem and, above all, emphasised the community’s ability to take part in the solution by using and managing its own resources.

Since then, self-building and the recycling of the materials have achieved a lunch-room as well as a community ethos of teamwork and the importance of the public service system. The parents behind this initiative are thereby laying the foundations of the committed citizens they want their children to be in the future.

Furthermore, after several meetings, the Dos Hermanas City Council decided to sponsor the project by extending the new facility to a wider range of use, scheduling different activities apart from the lunch-time service, not only for the school but also for the neighbourhood. Some funds have been specifically allocated to self-building, making the project possible and sustainable. Step by step, the lunch-room project has become a social project able to involve the whole local community.