About the project
Repartir (distribute) seeks to distribute knowledge among young people and change agents, primarily through biodesigning Sustainable Futures and Regenerative Presents, by leveraging citizen participation, systemic design, and entrepreneurship. Repartir focuses on three main strategies: Design for Change, a systemic design approach to address complexity and design sustainable futures with grassroots innovations through citizen science and triple-impact entrepreneurship; Incubation and Acceleration (Impacta Fab City), a program with consulting and mentoring for entrepreneurs and startups with regenerative business models; and the Fab City León initiative, promoting the circular economy and urban regeneration in León, Mexico, through a participatory process to develop its roadmap and create communities of practice. Repartir’s first year focused on the regenerative economy, evolving toward integral, inclusive, and interdependent systemic design for the adoption of innovation and to achieve climate justice. Repartir seeks to empower citizens to take ownership of innovation and generate meaningful change in their communities.
Repartir’s approach is based on systemic design to understand complexity and drive grassroots innovation. A central tool in its methodology is the redesigned Iceberg Diagram, an open-source tool for co-creating value propositions that drive sustainable business models and positive impact. This diagram helps visualize the visible and hidden aspects of a system, facilitating a deep understanding of underlying challenges and paradigms. It has been tested in various participatory and co-creative workshops with positive results. A prominent example of its application was during Futures Week Cochabamba (Bolivia), where students from Unifranz University participated in a workshop using this canvas and methodology to design Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) and projects with social and environmental impact, with the aim of being prototyped later in the Fab Lab. Repartir promotes citizen participation, citizen science, and triple-impact entrepreneurship as key elements to achieve systemic change and build more sustainable futures.
The main driver behind Repartir | Participative Regeneration and the Fab City León initiative is Francisco “Paco” Flores. Described as an “earthizen with the superpower of connecting ideas, people, and organizations,” Paco Flores is the Director of the Irrazonables Accelerator and has experience advising startups internationally. He is also a lead facilitator at the We Make Change organization and honorary Director of Urban Laboratories at the International Network of Smart Cities (RICI). His academic background includes an award-winning thesis on Sustainable Mobility and two Master’s degrees in Communication and Design Laboratories and another in Design for Emerging Futures (IAAC, ELISAVA). In 2021, he was a resident researcher in CENTRINNO, a project focused on post-industrial productive cities. His participation in the Urban Laboratory of León led to his selection for the photographic exhibition “Co-creating the Cities We Deserve” at COP 28 and to appear in the documentary “Voices from the Ground.” Paco Flores is an activist for sustainable mobility and a consultant in innovation, urban laboratories, citizen science, and emerging technologies.