By Michelle Carrero
The morning of the 4th of November 2016 Ciudad Museo set its journey to the city of San Juan to present our idea and compete in the 2016 “ExpoEmprende” brought by the Banco Popular de Puerto Rico. That day, wearing our matching “Ciudad Museo” t-shirts, we took on a new adventure, being proud of what we’ve been accomplishing and with a fresh vision of what we wanted to contribute to our city. The truth is that I had a mixture of feelings: nervousness, excitement and was also a bit sleepy, I’m not going to lie. In the end, having to wake up earlier than normal, and having to fight my blanket to let me go, bore its rewards. That day we shared with the rest of the island the project and vision I truly believed on and still do. Together we gave our best presentations and won two first places that brought pride to our team and community. What is “ExpoEmprende PR”? It is an initiative brought by the Banco Popular de Puerto Rico that invites students from all over the island to compete and exhibit their micro-businesses or organizations in order to provide support to develop them. Ciudad Museo was competing in the categories “Business Ideas” and “Microenterprise Exhibition”. For my part, together with my colleagues Gabriela Ríos and Heiliz Arroyo, I was competing in the category of “Microenterprise Exhibition” in which we set up our exhibition table and explained our project, vision, its importance and what we had achieved through art in our town of Añasco. It was a unique experience, not only for our group, but also for me, because arriving there and finding what looked like a sea of students, visitors, reporters and judges was a little overwhelming. Just like my mom says, sometimes you just have to “dive right in and move forward” and that’s what I did there with my colleagues. Even without having much experience, we rose up and accepted the challenge, doing our best work and sharing with others our colorful dream of bringing art to our streets. “ExpoEmprende PR” opened doors for Ciudad Museo that helped make it the organization it is today. It has definitely grown a lot since that November of 2016, just as each of our teammates did too. We learned once again to fight for our dreams, to execute in a competitive environment, to work in unity and we felt the joy of seeing how others also believed in what we were doing. That continued to drive us to do what today Ciudad Museo has been able to share with other cities on the island, because in the end, “Ciudad Museo is all of us”.