Decide to dream again

4,000 young people were chosen to take part in the initiative ‘Move to the rhythm of the beat’ and Sebastián Hatum Pontón was one of them, with a special affinity for music and for the industry, this 27-year-old decided to apply to the call. The program includes training in music production, fundamentals of the music industry and, a component which at first was of little interest: training aimed at career guidance and the development of life skills.
“All my life I have been tied to music empirically. Always curious about the industry, how to generate an income, royalty rights…This program has helped me to pick up on these topics in which I had made my first pines and that I had left abandoned due to personal fears,” he says.
And the program, apart from the training in music production, includes a psychosocial component, called DecidoSer, taught by the ACDI/VOCA LA Foundation, which Sebastian thought of attending solely to meet the requirement, without knowing that he would later discover that this It would be the basis to resume his dream of being a music producer.

“It only took one class to hook me, in the end I said ‘wow!’ without this component the program would not have been the same. There I understood that it was not only about the artistic but also about the emotional, and that was precisely what they taught us in DecidoSer, to manage our emotions, to believe in ourselves and in our abilities and to recognize that obstacles are part of the path. and that we must face them”.

Believing in himself is what this young man attributes for deciding to dream again, “since I was little, I always wanted to study music production and because of my fears I gave up that career, now this program has given me back that dream and here I am making music, which is what I like and growing more and more as a person and as an artist”.

Sebastián is a Social Communicator and Journalist from the Autonomous University of the Caribbean. Originally from Aracataca, Magdalena, he came to live in Barranquilla, when he, at only 21 years old, was a victim of forced displacement. Already in this city and having finished his undergraduate studies, he specialized in Organizational Communication Management and carried out other studies in strategic planning and marketing, to now dedicate himself to the world of advertising, which, from this experience, seeks to combine with his passion for music.

“My goal is to finish my own musical studio, which I have been creating with a lot of effort and make a business out of it by combining it with what I do on a daily basis. I work in an advertising agency, and I am very interested in continuing to strengthen the skills that I have in the musical field to make and sell advertising music”.
Within the framework of this alliance, Sebastián appreciates the opportunity to have met wonderful people and to have travelled to Washington, DC. as a special guest at the celebration of International Education Day: ‘Skills for youth. Investing in the human capital of Latin America and the Caribbean’, organized by the Inter-American Development Bank.

“I am happy to have participated in this program. I want to thank all the allies for giving us hope, for giving back our dreams to some, for making others dream and for allowing us to make music in a better way”.

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