Todxs cuentan in ECCO: community and belonging in mathematics

Federico Ardila–Mantilla∗ and Carolina Benedetti†

Aprendı que para uno encontrarse tiene quebuscar en la raız. [...] Aprendı que no soysolo yo, y que somos muchos mas.

Grupo Bahıa

1 What is ECCO?

The Encuentro Colombiano de Combinatoria is abiannual gathering of students and researchers fromColombia, Latin America, California, and manyother places. It is a two-week long summer school,featuring mini-courses by experts, collaborative prob-lem workshops, research talks and posters, openproblem sessions, a discussion panel, a hike, and vis-its to some of Colombia’s legendary salsa clubs. It isalso much more than a summer school, and we hopeto capture a bit of its spirit in these pages.

ECCO is designed to give every participant oppor-tunities to interact closely with people at all stagesof the mathematical career. We do our best to builda very professional and very warm atmosphere. Weare collaborators and we are also a community.

The Encuentro started as a small gathering forcombinatorics students in Colombia and the SanFrancisco Bay Area. They had taken classes together,as part of the SFSU-Colombia Combinatorics Initia-tive described in [1], and it had become clear thatthey wanted to meet in person, build closer ties, andfind ways to collaborate.

Since then, ECCO has broadened and gained astrong reputation. Students from many differentcountries now attend, and combinatorics experts alsoask us to participate. We communicate our goalsclearly. This is not a regular conference; it is a school

∗San Francisco State University, Universidad de Los Andes†Universidad de Los Andes

and an encuentro: a coming together. We askthese experts to do problem sets with the students,to present research questions that they would likehelp with, to offer advice, and to join the dance floorat some point. They have been wonderfully helpfuland inspiring mentors, they have recruited students,and – perhaps most meaningfully to us – several havementioned that their experiences at ECCO have in-fluenced their work at their home institutions.

As one becomes more experienced organizingevents, one becomes more conscious of their short-comings. ECCO is certainly an imperfect event. Af-ter seventeen years, it is still under construction, andwe hope it continues to be. But ECCO has beentremendously inspiring and energizing to us, and hastaught us a lot about what it might mean to truly findcommunity and belonging in a mathematical space.The goal of this article is to share a few of the lessonsthat we have learned from helping to build it.

2 Community Agreement, Part 1

When prospective participants are applying toECCO, they encounter our Community Agreement.The first part reads:

A rewarding experience for all. TheEncuentro Colombiano de Combinatoriaaims to offer a rewarding, challenging, sup-portive, and fun experience to every partic-ipant. We will build that rich experiencetogether by devoting our strongest availableeffort to all ECCO activities. You will bechallenged and supported. Please be pre-pared to take an active, critical, patient, andgenerous role in your own learning and thatof the other participants.

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When we meet in person, we start ECCO by re-minding everyone about this agreement. We ask peo-ple to get in pairs, read it out loud to each other, andspend a few minutes discussing it: What stands outto you about this agreement? What can it look liketo put it in practice?

We’re not gonna lie. While some participants jumpright in, many look confused, and if we are readingtheir body language correctly, a few seem to think:I can’t believe you are asking me to do this; whatam I, a kindergartener? But we insist. Everyoneparticipates.

To initiate a dialogue, we ask each group to under-line a few words in the agreement that resonate withthem, and share them with everyone. Some are ex-cited that they will be challenged; some that they willbe supported; some point out that the combination iscrucial. We discuss how to be productively critical ofeach other’s work, and what generosity might meanin a mathematical setting. We talk about how some-times we are very good at being patient with others,but not so good at being patient with ourselves.

We wrote this agreement to communicate, fromday one, the kind of space we are trying to buildcollectively. Johan, one of the participants of Dıasde Combinatoria1, shared with us an experience thatbecame an unforeseen consequence of the agreement.He told us that reading it on the webpage of Dıaswas the push he needed to apply, and to attend; forthe first time, he felt he was welcome in an event likethis.

3 Community Agreement, Part 2

The second part of the community agreement reads:2

A welcoming experience for all. ECCOis committed to creating a professional andwelcoming environment that benefits fromthe diversity of experiences of all its par-ticipants. We will not tolerate any form

1The Dıas summer school is one of the offsprings of ECCO.2This part of the agreement was based on a code of con-

duct written by Ashe Dryden; she has compiled many valuableresources on this topic. [6]

of discrimination or harassment. We aimto offer equal opportunity and treatment toevery participant regardless of their mathe-matical experience, gender identity, nation-ality, race or ethnicity, religion, age, mari-tal status, sexual orientation, disability, orany other factor.Behavior or language that is welcome or ac-ceptable to one person may be unwelcomeor offensive to another. Consequently, weask you to use extra care to ensure thatyour words and actions communicate respectfor others. This is especially important forthose in positions of authority or power,since individuals with less power have manyreasons to fear expressing their objectionsregarding unwelcome behavior.If a participant engages in discriminatory orharassing behavior, ECCO organizers maytake any action they deem appropriate, fromwarning the offender to immediately ex-pelling them from the event.If you are being harassed, you feel un-comfortable with the way you are beingtreated, you notice that someone else is be-ing harassed, or you have any other con-cerns, please contact Carolina Benedetti orFederico Ardila immediately. If you prefernot to speak in person, you may e-mail us(anonymously, if you wish) at the account

@ . , which only Federicoand Carolina have access to.

Again, we make sure everyone actively engageswith this text, reading it out loud in pairs and dis-cussing it, awkward as they might find that. We aredirect: social events are an essential part of ECCO,and we explicitly ask participants not to use themas excuses for romantic advances. We bring togethermore than 100 strangers from many different culturalbackgrounds for an intense shared experience; it isessential to have an agreement that clarifies expecta-tions, and gives the organizers the power to react topotential incidents.

We have co-created these agreements with our stu-dents at SFSU, ECCO, and Dıas de Combinatoria

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over the last few years. We prefer to call it a commu-nity agreement instead of a code of conduct, and takethe time to discuss it, so it does not just feel like anexternally imposed code of conduct that they mustobey, or worse, bureaucratic fine print. Our hope isto reach a collective agreement that is actually ours,that everyone is committed to.

In the ‘Any additional comments?’ question onthe exit survey of ECCO 2018, almost all partic-ipants who identified as women and/or LGBTQ+praised the community agreement, and several saidthey would like to have one in all math events. Twoparticipants wrote:

I thought the community agreement was anexcellent idea. The openness it allowed us tohave and to make a giant community out ofeveryone made the conference very special.I felt I could finally be myself after years offeeling caged in.

We made an agreement to acknowledge eachother’s differences and try our best to cre-ate a positive experience for everyone andit worked! We came together and did mathwithout fear or judgment. It was so muchfun! I think that the community agreementand the leadership of the organizers, TAs,and Colombians were driving forces behindmaking that possible. We all played a partby putting our hearts into creating the en-vironment we were longing for. I left feel-ing fired up about bringing ECCO home withme. I would love it if all of my classesstarted off with a community agreement atthe beginning of the semester.

A senior participant later told us: “I was very sur-prised at first, and looked at [the agreement] as anoddity. Then I remembered what it was like being agrad student at conferences, and all the weird guys Ihad to avoid. So I figured, yeah, why not?” Anotherparticipant, who had been assaulted in a mathemat-ical space before, told us that she simply does notattend conferences that do not have a plan to ensureher safety.

4 Breaking power structures.

In any group of people there is a hidden power struc-ture that influences who leads the discussion, whoparticipates, whose voices are listened to, whose ideasare seen as important. Our activities are most suc-cessful – for teachers and for students – when we areable to disrupt those power structures as much as pos-sible, when every participant feels that their presenceis important and their thoughts are valuable. We tryto do this constantly, in several ways; a particularlysuccessful one occurs outside of the classroom.

Figure 1: Lecturers and students on the dance floor.

On Saturday nights, ECCO moves to the dancefloor of the best salsa club we can find. The truthis that many of our international experts look a bitintimidated when they first walk in. For most ofthem, this is not the kind of place they visit often,if ever. Few people at the discoteca look like them;they might feel like they don’t really belong there.

Very soon, the students approach them and invitethem to dance. They don’t accept “I don’t know howto dance” for an answer; they teach them, patiently,kindly, from the beginning, or just persuade them todance as they will.

We won’t pretend our guests become expertdancers overnight; that really does not matter. Butthey always seem really grateful to the students whomake sure they are comfortable, who guide themthrough a few steps, who probably help them finda bit of freedom inside their body. Some of us have

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known these professors for years, and we get to see asmile that they have never shown us before.

We like to ask our course instructors to keep inmind the feeling of discomfort they might have hadentering the discoteca, and the feeling of growth andjoy they hopefully had walking out. Many ECCO stu-dents – who have never met so many accomplishedmathematicians, who may have never attended amath conference before – are probably feeling a simi-lar discomfort when they walk into the classroom; wewant them to have that sense of belonging, growth,and empowerment when they leave. Since the profes-sor was vulnerable in front of the student, the studentcan more comfortably say “I don’t understand, canyou explain this to me?” when needed. Since thestudent showed generosity and patience on the dancefloor, the professor naturally shows a similar generos-ity and patience in the classroom. Dancing serves asa way of illustrating how classrooms can be mademore joyful and empowering spaces to everyone.

We must return ourselves to a state of em-bodiment in order to deconstruct the waypower has been traditionally orchestrated inthe classroom.

bell hooks [8]

The dance floor is one of the most democraticspaces of the tremendously unequal societies we livein. At ECCO it is a place of joy, and also a place ofpedagogy, for professors and students alike.

5 Problem workshops: thinkingsimply about deep things

Mathematically, ECCO aims for a low floor, highceiling approach. We want the courses and activitiesto be designed so that everyone is able to engage withthem at some level, and no one runs out of questionsto explore. Every participant should find interestingthings to learn. This is perhaps best exemplified inthe way that problem workshops are structured.

Each minicourse meets four times, and each 60-minute class meeting is followed by a 90-minute prob-lem workshop. People self-identify their level of ex-

pertise, and we split them into groups as heteroge-neously as we can. A typical group will include aprofessor or postdoc, a graduate student in combi-natorics, and two undergraduates with scarce com-binatorial experience. Many participants speak verylittle English, and many speak very little Spanish, soeveryone has something to learn and something toteach. We offer materials in Spanish or English, andthe unofficial language of mathematical discussions isSpanglish. People are welcome to use the languagethey wish; interestingly, many choose to communi-cate in a foreign language for the first time; this istheir opportunity to try it.

Figure 2: Collaboration in a problem workshop.

The first problems on each list ask people to carryout a small example, to ensure that everyone under-stands the key constructions or results in the class.The last few problems on the list can be very chal-lenging, and may take days or weeks to solve. We askeach group to keep in mind our community agree-ment: how can they make the problem session re-warding, challenging, supportive, and fun for everyparticipant? The result has always exceeded our ex-pectations.

We realize this approach is unusual. Occasionally,it faces some resistance. A few of the more experi-enced participants have asked: “Why don’t you letthe beginners work on the easy problems together,and we can focus on the hardest problems?” But thisis how these experts have been operating for most oftheir career; why not learn something new?

It is very rare for an undergraduate to get to collab-orate with an expert of one field on questions about

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a different field, and see: Experts struggle too! Howdo they productively struggle? These are very valu-able lessons for the undergraduates. It is also veryrare for an expert to get to collaborate with a rel-ative newcomer to mathematics, as equals. Whenthey find a way to do it, they inevitably deepen theirunderstanding of the subject.

The last few minutes of the problem workshop arespent sharing solutions. We ask the people who areusually very comfortable speaking up to make spacefor others. We invite the least experienced or theleast vocal participants to present their work; theyare the ones who can grow the most from doing so,and with the right atmosphere and maybe a bit of ex-tra encouragement, they are usually happy to speak.

Andres Vindas–Melendez, who was a Master’s stu-dent at the time, described his experience [11]:

The exercises were mathematically mean-ingful, but what is noteworthy is that allgroup members played an active role inreaching a solution and understanding ofthe concepts. I observed that the more ex-perienced mathematicians went directly tothinking about the abstraction of the prob-lems, where the younger students empha-sized a more concrete approach to exem-plify the theory occurring in the problem. Ofcourse both ways of thinking are valuable.

This reminds us of Gelfand’s request when encoun-tering a new mathematical topic:

Explain this to me in a simple example; thedifficult example I will be able to do on myown.

Israel M. Gelfand [7]

Satisfying this request can be very challenging forbeginners and experts alike, and it can also besurprisingly rewarding and enlightening. The cele-brated Ross Mathematics Program extols the valueof thinking deeply about simple things. Weagree wholeheartedly, and propose the counterpartas well: there is a tremendous amount to be learnedfrom thinking simply about deep things.

Figure 3: Rekha Thomas teaches optimization.

6 Universal design.

Mathematicians from overrepresented groups inmathematics often ask “Why do you need these mathconferences for minorities? Don’t we all do the samemathematics?” To try to answer, allow us to digressfor a moment.

Let us share an embarrassing confession: The firsttime we got in a public bus in North America, andsomeone in a wheelchair got on, we could not believeour eyes. Are all 50 of us really going to wait allthis time for one person to get on? Did the city re-ally spend all this money putting all this equipmenton every bus for such a small percentage of the pop-ulation? We both grew up riding the ramschacklebuses of Bogota, jumping in and out of them whilethey were still in motion, collecting frequent minorbruises along the way. We should have known better.

The term “universal design,”3 coined by architectRon Mace, describes the concept of designing allproducts and built environments to be aesthetic andusable to the greatest extent possible by everyone,regardless of their age, ability, or status in life. Whatmay be unintuitive about universal design is that,what may seem like designing for a small minority,ends up being a better design for the majority. Infact, once it becomes widely used, it is no longer seenas serving “special” needs.

We often forget that sidewalk ramps were installed

3We would like to thank May-Li Khoe for teaching us aboutuniversal design and its wide applicability.

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in every US city thanks to the Americans withDisabilities Act of 1990, after decades of activism.They were originally designed for people who usewheelchairs to go on and off sidewalks easily. Today,everyone uses them: a kid on a tricycle, a parent witha stroller, a traveller with a suitcase, a skate boarder,or the two of us when we were dealing with injuries.Everyone benefits from them.

With this in mind, let us propose an analogy:

Mathematics education cannot truly im-prove until it adequately addresses the verystudents who the system has most failed.[...] We need a central focus on studentswho are Latinx, Black, and Indigenous [...],developing practices and measures that feelhumane to those specific communities as ameans to guide the field.

Rochelle Gutierrez [4]

This does not come naturally, or without some oppo-sition. Sexism, racism, classism, and centralism oftenlead to a small, homogeneous group of students be-ing valued more than the rest, tacitly or explicitly.Academic elitism centers the voices and interests ofthe “top” students from the “top” schools, whatever“top” might mean. Furthermore, in Colombia, wealways seem to put the needs of our foreign guestsabove our own.

At ECCO we are intentional and unapologeticabout focusing on the needs and interests of the localstudents, the less experienced students, and the stu-dents from regional universities that have less accessto activities like this. It is our belief, and our ex-perience, that when we find practices and structurethat truly serve these students, we do much morethan serving these students. We find practices andstructures that benefit the wider mathematical com-munity.

For example, we must confess that the organizingcommittee had not explicitly thought about the ex-perience of the LGBTQ+ community at ECCO. Butour struggles are connected, sometimes in ways thatwe do not foresee. Postdoc Aram Dermenjian [5]wrote:

The single-handed biggest reason I loved thisconference was the diversity and inclusive-ness. In recent years I felt like the only gayperson doing mathematics. I’ve started tofeel more and more lonely in my math com-munity. All my friends are amazing andthey always try to make me feel welcome,but it’s just not the same.Having a community agreement allowed ev-eryone to be open about themselves allowingqueer people to be out. It gave me the con-fidence to do something I had never donebefore. I invited my math friends at ECCOto a gay club. Sure, more than half of usweren’t gay, and sure, the gay club wasn’tthat amazing, but just being out, in a gayclub, with mathematicians... was amazing.I felt I belonged.

Professor Viviane Pons [10] wrote:

One question arose from the students: whydo professors come and teach at ECCO?They saw clearly what was the gain forthem, but the reason we would spend timeand energy there was not clear to all ofthem. So let me tell you what I (andthe scientific community as a whole) gainfrom that investment. I can help shape theacademic world to something better and tosomething I like. Being part of ECCO isone step in this direction, because that is thekind of math community I want.

7 The Colombian way

Worldwide, people have (accurate or inaccurate)ideas of what is the “French style,” “Hungarianstyle,” or “Japanese style” of doing mathematics.In a country that is relatively new to research inmathematics, perhaps we still have the opportunityto shape what “Colombian mathematics” might lookand feel like.

Many would argue that mathematics does not dis-tinguish a person’s culture or nationality. Unfortu-nately, this widespread belief has led many of us to

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feel forced to leave our humanity at the door, andstruggle to fit in with the dominant mathematicalcultures and practices. But our cultures are too richto be dismissed when we enter mathematics, and dis-missing them is a loss to mathematics itself.

Research has shown that creating learn-ing environments that value and incorporatestudents’, families’, and community mem-bers’ cultural and linguistic strengths intoinstruction creates a nexus to mathematicscognition. [...] Culture and mathematicslearning are intertwined in that they are bothtransformed through everyday lived experi-ences and are shaped by those experiences.

Michael Orosco and Naheed Abdulrahim [9]

We are not interested in patriotism, but we are in-terested in culture and values. How might we use thecultural practices of Colombian communities to pos-itively influence the cultural practices of Colombianmathematical communities, or at least the culturalpractices of ECCO?

Colombians pride ourselves in being good hosts,and making every effort to help our guests feel wel-come and comfortable.

We are proud of our food, our music, our rebusque,and our stories. At ECCO, these all end up playinga central role.

Every ECCO seems to have an improvised fruittour, where we cross town to visit the local fruitmarket. It’s a bit like going to the zoo, and get-ting to see all these species that you didn’t knowexisted. One time after dinner, the visiting profes-sors asked students to list all the local fruits theyknew; after about 70 different fruits, everyone gottired of this exercise. At the market, Greta boughta huge guanabana to share, even though she had noidea what it was. Someone thought it looked like asmall alien. Those were not coronavirus times, so noone thought twice about tasting this white, slimy gi-ant, despite the fact that the more people dug in, theblacker it got. Eww!!, you might say, and you mightbe right. But this unplanned experience created alasting bond. Participants keep connecting aroundfood throughout ECCO; by the end, the foreigners

are showing the locals delicious restaurants and foodsthat we didn’t know.4

Colombia has a unique salsa culture, where eachsalsoteca has a wall full of hard-to-find vinyl recordsfrom the 60s and 70s – mostly salsa, cumbia, andWest African music – and this is what the DJ plays allnight long. People of all ages dance with their family,their friends, their coworkers, and with any strangerwho asks to dance with them. No one does thosefancy turns and slimy moves they teach in Americansalsa lessons. Everyone sings along as they dance. AtECCO, we organize a visit to the salsoteca with thedeepest music collection we can find; Cesar gives ev-eryone (foreigners and bogotanos alike) dance lessons,the venue gives us maracas and cowbells to play along(and they take them away if our rhythm is not onpoint), and everyone dances together. And once thedancing starts, it does not stop. Imagine a confer-ence in which participants work hard during the day,dance during the night and get up fresh and earlynext morning all over again, for two weeks. Well,dancing drains some energy out of us, but it also fu-els us to return to the conference the next day andgive it our all. In the final survey, undergraduatestudent Eliana said:

I think that dancing is an important part ofECCO and it changes the whole dynamic ina very positive way. In Colombia mathe-matics is danced.

Colombians are used to working with a shortage ofresources, and we have a strong culture of rebusque:in the face of difficulty, there is always an ingenioussolution to be found within our means. The firsttime we organized a summer course in geometric com-binatorics for undergraduates, we were advised byforeigners that Colombian students would not havethe preparation necessary to understand these top-ics, that we should teach a basic course in abstractalgebra instead. But, for better or for worse, a lack ofpreparation has never stopped a Colombian from try-ing to accomplish something. We don’t really believein deficit mindsets. This culture of rebusque proba-bly shapes our conviction that even if you do not have

4For the record, guanabanas are heavenly.

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a lot of experience with mathematics, if you are hard-working and resourceful, you can take a class aboutcurrent research directions from the world experts inthe field, learn from it, and contribute to it.

The final activity of ECCO is a panel discussionwhere we talk about personal issues that most of usstruggle with at every stage of our careers, but werarely or never talk about. Discussion ranges fromeveryday topics such as “What does a typical day inyour life look like?” to more trascendental ones as“What tools have worked for you to deal with stress,anxiety, or a sense of not belonging in academia?”.We choose a broad range of panelists, from professorsto undergrads, from all parts of Colombia and theworld. To be truthful, we are not big fans of mathpanels in general. Why does this one feel different tous? Perhaps it’s that a strong sense of communityand trust has been built by the end of ECCO, andthis leads to a very honest conversation that does notshy away from strong emotions. Perhaps it’s simplythat people, and their stories, are really important tous. Daniel wrote:

(The panel) is one of the most relevantthings at ECCO. Breaking with the idea ofmath as a selfish and lonely task should bea priority. Talking like human beings, withour emotions and conflicts, is fundamen-tal. Unfortunately this is rarely done in aca-demic events. Congratulations to the orga-nizers for recognizing the need to human-ize math and mathematicians. This was acathartic experience.

This encuentro is an intense mental, physical, andemotional experience. We seem to have a tacit agree-ment to store lots of energy prior to ECCO, and bud-get a few days of recovery afterwards. We start as abunch of strangers and end, with tears of joy, promis-ing to keep in touch, planning our next encuentro.

8 What does ECCO wish to be?

What makes a scholar decide whether to participatein an academic environment? Most academic confer-ences are conceived as spaces whose main purpose is

to advance the creation of knowledge in a very tra-ditional way. This tradition can make such spacesvery hostile for many of us given their homogeneityof race, gender, ideology, and experiences.

We love mathematics, and we know that the aca-demic mathematical world will evaluate us and ourstudents by what mathematics we engage with andproduce. Thus it is crucial that we offer courses andworkshops and are involved in research of a very highquality – while recognizing that “quality” is subjec-tive. We invite professors who are world experts intheir fields, excellent lecturers, and compassionatehuman beings. They give minicourses in some of themost exciting research directions in combinatorics,with strong connections to other fields of mathemat-ics. This strongly influences the kind of research thatwe and our students end up involved in.

Figure 4: ECCO ’18 participants from six countriesand five cities in Colombia.

For us, it is equally crucial to be mindful of howwe engage with and produce high quality mathemat-ics. Valuing and promoting respect and differencehas been essential to the development of ECCO. Weseek to create an environment where each participantis empowered to take the space that belongs to them,and share their voice, ideas, experiences, and worldviews, inside and outside the classroom. More than aconference, ECCO has become a space where learn-ing mathematics is as important as recognizing each

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other as mathematicians and as individuals. If we areaware of what makes us different mathematically andpersonally, we can take advantage of these differencesto complement each other.

The difficult, but also essential part, is tovalue respect and difference positively; notas minor, inevitable nuisances, but as theelements that enrich life and encourage cre-ation and thought.

Estanislao Zuleta [13]

ECCO brings together a close-knit community ofmathematicians who are spread out all over theworld. To consolidate this community and institu-tionalize our efforts, we recently founded an officialresearch group recognized by Colciencias, the Colom-bian science agency. This has allowed us to sys-tematize and strengthen our research collaborationswith each other and with the combinatorics commu-nity at large. For example, it has led to the found-ing of the Seminario Sabanero de Combinatoria5 inBogota, and it has strengthened our mathematicalconnections with ALTENUA6 in Colombia, and withCIMPA7 worldwide.

Mathematics is not independent from society, andwe hope that this mathematical event can be a mod-est contribution towards the society that we wouldlike to be a part of. Getting more organized insti-tutionally has also helped us initiate, support, andpromote various outreach efforts across the country.

During ECCO, we always host a public event inpartnership with local initiatives, like Clubes de Cien-cia Colombia8, the science museum Parque Explorain Medellın, and the Nortematica festival for highschool students at UniNorte in Barranquilla.

To achieve a more lasting effect, we also challengeECCO participants to continue to mold their mathe-

5SeSaCo is a weekly seminar that rotates locations amongfive universities in Bogota.

6ALTENUA is a research group in algebra and number the-ory with a very strong presence in many regions of Colombia.

7CIMPA is a nonprofit organization founded in France thatpromotes research in mathematics in developing countries.

8This is a program that helps Colombian researchers abroadlead scientific workshops with students from public highschools in various regions of Colombia. Our work with themis described in [3].

Figure 5: The future: Barranquilla high schoolers.

matical knowledge, so that it can be used beyond thecreation and understanding of science, as a tool ofpositive societal and human impact. This has led tothe construction of other mathematical communitiesthat celebrate different ways of learning, and helpdehomogenize the concept of academia in Colom-bia. Examples include Dıas de Combinatoria9, andCırculos Matematicos10. These are not “gifted youthprograms,” which are very valuable but tend to servethe students that already have the most access; ourefforts aim to reach the broadest group of participantspossible. Our goal is not to create an army of follow-ers who become mathematicians and perpetuate ouridea of academia, but to contribute to a society thatappreciates and uses mathematics, and takes advan-tage of its rich cultural diversity to improve itself.

ECCO wishes to help build a strong and dynamicresearch network that collaborates regionally and in-ternationally, and produces very interesting mathe-matical work. We also wish to help create a cultureof sharing mathematical knowledge with the public,and using this knowledge to have a positive impactin all sectors of society. Finally, we wish to be verymindful of how we do this work, putting our human-

9Dıas is a summer school in basic combinatorics, gearedtowards undergraduates who haven’t had access to classes inthis area. More than half of Dıas alumni, from 16 differentuniversities in 9 different cities, went on to attend ECCO.

10Cırculos is now a national program that helps high schoolstudents from public schools fall in love with mathematics inan inclusive, non-competitive setting.

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Figure 6: The future: Dıas ’17 alumni at ECCO ’18.

ity, our values, and the diversity of our cultures atthe center of everything that we do. These are thegoals that guide our work. In our minds, they areinseparable.

9 Prevention and Intervention

When we returned home from the most recent ECCO,we received a message from one of our foreign partici-pants. She had very kind words about the conference,particularly about the community agreement and thedancing. However, there were times when the danc-ing made her uncomfortable, and she felt that somedance partners were not sensitive to her discomfort.

No conference organizer is happy to receive a mes-sage like hers. But it may be a good sign that she feltcomfortable enough to share this with us, and trustedthat we would listen and take it seriously. We aregrateful to her, because her message showed us thatwe have more work to do to make the communityagreement more effective. We have since strength-ened our prevention and intervention protocols:

1) We have contributed to and incorporated thenew protocols of the Commission of Gender and Eq-uity of the Colombian Mathematical Society. [12]

2) We have gathered concrete, practical resourcesfor future ECCO organizers on how to respond topotential incident reports, relying on Ashe Dryden’svaluable work. [6]

3) We plan on adding a short training on bystander

intervention to the schedule; this has proved an ef-fective tool to stop harassment on college campuses.Oversimplifying, it proposes: Let’s talk about howwe treat each other, keep an eye out for each other,and intervene if needed. We need to understand thisas a community issue, and not an individual issue,if we want to truly transform the harmful practicesthat our societies have normalized.

Mathematics has lost too many people – primar-ily women and people of color – to harassment anddiscrimination, and silence has never protected thevictims. Perhaps by sharing with you how we areconfronting these problems in our context, we mayhelp you confront them in yours.

10 Keeping the flow

− Fede, why did you start ECCO? Did you have allof this in mind?

− No, Caro. I can’t pretend I was super thought-ful when ECCO started. There was so little activityin combinatorics in Colombia, I just wanted to dosomething. I did know from the beginning that Iwanted it to be really student-centered, collabora-tive, and unhierarchical. Already in 2003 we hadprofessors and undergraduates working together onproblems that neither knew how to solve.

I was working with students in Colombia and Cal-ifornia who were very different from each other, andI knew you could learn a lot from each other. Youwere also very similar to each other; I thought wecould build a space where you all would feel reallycomfortable and thrive, mathematically and person-ally. Also, I saw very little understanding and col-laboration between Latinx mathematicians from theUS and from Latin America, and I thought we couldbuild a bridge. I knew you and Amanda Ruiz wouldlove working together.

As time went on, more and more young people ar-rived, and you all brought many great ideas. I lovedhow it started evolving!

− (smirking) “Organically,” like the hipsters say?

− Organically, like Californians say. We are going touse that word in the article.

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− Noooooo!!!!

− One thing I did know, early on, is that I could nothold on too tightly; I had to share the decision mak-ing, and make myself replaceable as quickly as pos-sible. I have seen many amazing math programs runby the same person for decades; they get stuck! Thefounders don’t want to let go; it’s their baby. Theparticipants start respecting the founder too muchto point out the serious shortcomings that they see.There is no room for new ideas. It’s a real danger.Programs need to evolve.

− I must confess that I was really worried when yousaid you weren’t going to organize ECCO anymore.

− Why?

− Who had the experience, credibility, and recogni-tion you did? Little did I know that we had beenlearning more than math from you: leadership andcommunity building were growing within each of us.

− That’s what you think because I’m older. I also feelthat I learned this from you all. I think that’s whatFreire means when he talks about co-constructingknowledge, or experiences: learning from each otheras we build it together.

Anyway, you and I know that ECCO has gottenmuch better since I stopped organizing it.

− Hahaha, that’s true.

− What have you tried to bring to ECCO, Caro?

− I don’t know. But I can tell you what I would loveto bring to and take from it. ECCO gave me backmy hope in academia. I have wanted to run awayfrom this environment many times and the more Iget involved in ECCO, the more I realize that it ispossible to make use of math knowledge to bring outjoy from each of us. That joy then transforms intoaction which transforms into building more spaceslike this. I would love to bring and take that passionthat brought me back to wanting to be in academia,at least for the moment. Every time ECCO ends Ifeel all this energy that wants to be materialized intotaking action toward a more inclusive math environ-ment.

− I love hearing that. I know that feeling too. Butyou’re being too humble. One of my favorite thingsabout ECCO has been to see you and many others

really take ownership of this project, and bring suchwonderful new energy, ideas, and perspectives. Ithas kept ECCO evolving constantly. But more im-portantly, I believe it has empowered each one of usto take agency and really work towards the mathe-matical society that we would like to be a part of.

I am so impressed by your work with Rafa on Dıasand SeSaCo, with many others on Cırculos and inthe Comision, by the growing collaborations withALTENUA and CIMPA, by the work that Alejo,Ana, Andres, Cesar, Federico C, Felipe, Jose, Laura,Mandy, Nelly, and so many others are doing with asimilar spirit in Colombia and abroad11 – even when Iget to march with some of you on the streets when it’sneeded, I feel so uplifted! I’m not saying ECCO canor should take credit for all of this, but I am sayingthat ECCO is now one part of a growing ecosystem ofinterconnected initiatives that I think will have a bigimpact in the long run. In fact, I think it’s the onlyway we can make a big impact in the long run. Sowhat do you think we still need to work on? What’snext for ECCO?

− Ufff... it’s funny because I feel that the more wekeep doing, the more needs to be done. But don’t besurprised if you start seeing Dias de schoolsorganized by other people; we have been asked towrite a roadmap on how to organize events like thisin other areas.

On the other hand, I believe one of the most im-portant things we need to do is to start building trustwith regions that have not made part of the thingswe do. I do not know a definite answer on how thatcan be done but I am positive that we need to bephysically in those places to make that happen. Wecan start by remembering that context matters, andit is not the same to do science in Bogota or Medellınthan to do it in el Pacıfico.12 Context makes peoplefeel heard and recognized. On my end I know I needto educate myself on science from a multicultural per-spective. As much as I love all we have been doingwith ECCO I feel it is missing one leg. I feel that as

11Some of these efforts are described in Section 8.12La Region del Pacıfico is a region of great biodiversity and

economic importance to Colombia. Its population – approxi-mately 90% of which is Afro-Colombian – has been historicallyneglected by the national government.

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long as we are not capable of taking full advantageof the multiculturality of Colombia, we will just con-tinue doing things closer to the traditional way thanwe think.

Some tools that may come in handy are the imple-mentation of Cırculos and/or Dıas in other regions.I’d love to see a Cırculo Matematico that takes intoaccount the richness and traditions in el Pacıfico. Iam not saying I want to create it, but rather I wouldlove to contribute to its creation. We could startbuilding bridges with local organizations there to thisend. If we manage to expand our community to in-volve members outside of the main cities of Colombia,we will be better off with the future of ECCO.

ECCO has become, to me, an opportunity to re-think academia and do science my way, and I wouldlove for others to feel the power that has given me.Hopefully in a few years we will stop seeing el Pacıficoas that foreign place we are unfamiliar with and onlythink of when planning holidays, and instead thinkof it as a place where we draw our role models ofacademia from.

Figure 7: Tree huggers in the Antioquia forest.

11 Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our warm gratitude to theECCO family, who have become our mathematicalhome. They have allowed us to experience true com-

munity and belonging in a mathematical space. Wealso thank the editors of this volume for the invita-tion to write this article.

FA was supported by NSF grant DMS-1855610, Si-mons Fellowship 613384, and NIH SF BUILD grant1UL1MD009608-01. CB was supported by GrantFAPA of the Faculty of Science at the Universidadde Los Andes.

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[12] Comision de Equidad y Genero, Sociedad Colombiana deMatematicas. Protocolo de conducta y accion para laprevencion e intervencion ante la denuncia y/o consultade situaciones de violencia o discriminacion. June, 2019.https://scm.org.co/comision-de-equidad-y-genero/

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