Ricardo Gorodisch

Ricardo is transforming how society supports teenage parents by integrating mental health, education, and rights-based approaches into a single, community-driven model. Through Fundación Kaleidos and its pioneering program Jakairá, he empowers young families while reshaping public systems to respond with empathy, coordination, and long-term care.

Ricardo envisions a society where adolescent mothers and fathers—often marginalized and unsupported—are empowered to break cycles of poverty, exclusion, and educational disruption. Rather than limiting its focus to pregnancy prevention, he addresses the structural challenges young parents face by integrating social, educational, and health systems creating local ecosystems of care, while also reshaping cultural perceptions of adolescent parenthood. The underlying principle behind Ricardo´s approach recognizes adolescent parents not as problems to solve, but as individuals with the potential to thrive when given the right opportunities.

Through a free care program for underserved youth (according to UNICEF figures, more than 60% of children and adolescents in Argentina live in poverty), the model seeks to transform adolescent parents into protagonists of their own development for themselves and their children. To achieve this, Ricardo drew on his vast academic and field training as a physician and child psychiatrist to create a cross-cutting approach with a rights-based and gender-based focus, enabling adolescents to develop a personal project, build a care network for their children, maintain healthy relationships (with partners, family, and institutions) and have their sexual, reproductive, and (non)reproductive rights guaranteed. A daily nursery to address early childhood development and group and individual assessment for adolescents enables moving to a system of triads in which every member of the family has a role, even if the parents are not in a relationship. Through various initiatives at Jakairá, they find a space for development and care that is different from the usual responses that place adolescents exclusively in their role as mothers, and give no role to male fathers, therefore exposing children to a high risk of facing abandonment and lack of opportunities.

Ricardo and his team scale their model through Red MAPA, a regional network across Latin America that enables other organizations and municipalities to replicate the approach with ongoing support and training. This structure ensures that the model is not simply exported but meaningfully adapted to local contexts. The model includes six months of online training, the design of a local implementation model, and three years of gradually reduced support. The model proposes peer-to-peer learning focused on transmitting knowledge, highlighting impact, and learning from new localized practices. By building a model that can be embedded in existing services, Ricardo paves the way for a Latin American ecosystem where different actors—governments, schools, NGOs—can offer adolescent parents the support they need to thrive. Since 2017, they have developed 14 editions of the train-the-trainers with more than 2,000 participants. This program includes training for 900 team members from the Secretariat for Children, Adolescents, and Families, which adopted Ricardo´s model for working with adolescent mothers and fathers across Argentina. They have just launched an initiative with 20 pilot pharmacies in Farmacity, a national pharmacy network with 200 locations across the country, through which they train volunteer professionals as counselors and support centers for adolescents. If the results are positive, they will expand it to all pharmacies in the network.

In Argentina, adolescent motherhood and fatherhood are deeply tied to systemic inequality, social exclusion, and entrenched cultural norms. Every day, in the country around 130 adolescents become mothers and lack access to comprehensive sexual education and limited reproductive healthcare. In 8 out of 10 cases, pregnancies were unintentional, and in many cases a consequence of abuse. These young parents, most of them living in poverty, face intense vulnerability: they are more likely to leave school, experience isolation, and encounter structural barriers that hinder their ability to build a stable future. The burden of caregiving falls disproportionately on adolescent mothers, while young fathers are pushed into precarious economic roles, often with little support for their continued education or emotional development.

Cultural expectations and gender roles reinforce this cycle, discouraging school retention and long-term planning. Despite the magnitude of the issue, public policy in Argentina has historically focused on prevention rather than inclusive support. Adolescents who are already parents often find themselves navigating fragmented and inaccessible systems. Schools lack flexible structures and adequate childcare; healthcare services are unevenly distributed, particularly in rural areas; and social services often operate in isolation, making comprehensive support almost unreachable.
The consequences are severe. Many adolescent parents drop out of school, limiting their economic mobility and perpetuating intergenerational poverty. Their children often face the same social and health disadvantages, reinforcing the poverty cycles they were born into. Mental health concerns, stigma, and isolation are common, further compounding the difficulties these families face. Health risks are also elevated: young mothers face higher rates of complications during pregnancy and childbirth, and their children are more vulnerable to developmental delays and poor health outcomes.

In response, social organizations generally provide insufficiently, focused on mothers and their maternal role, prioritizing it over all other aspects that develop during adolescence: studies, relationships, first steps in life projects, and the physical and mental changes inherent to this stage. And for their part, state entities give patchy and uncoordinated responses that lack a gender approach, with many agencies involved.

Ricardo and his team are building localized ecosystems of care that structurally transform how adolescent parents from vulnerable backgrounds develop their lives and those of their children. Their core belief is that early parenthood should not mean the end of adolescence, education, or personal development. Kaleidos works to ensure that adolescents can care and be cared for, without giving up on their right to study, grow, and thrive. Rather than treating adolescent pregnancy as a problem to solve, they promote a system where young parents are seen as capable individuals with the right to access support, build life projects, and care for their children in healthy and supported ways.

The cornerstone of this strategy is Proyecto Jakairá, a free, interdisciplinary care program that reaches hundreds of adolescent mothers, fathers, and children per year across Kaleidos’s centers in Buenos Aires City and Córdoba, among the reach in replications in development. It combines group and individual psychological support, early childhood care, legal counseling, and educational guidance. A fundamental innovation is the shift to a triadic approach—mother, father, and child—where each person has an active role, even when the parents are not a couple. Jakairá's approach highlights the special emphasis on shared parenting, standing out from most proposals that only focus on adolescents and their role as mothers. The workshops for adolescent fathers provide a safe, nonjudgmental space where young men can share their experiences, challenge gender stereotypes, and strengthen an active, nurturing, and responsible approach to fatherhood. Through professional support and peer connection, the workshops promote healthy relationships from the earliest years of a child's life and help identify specific support needs in a timely manner.
Caring for emotional aspects is central to Jakairá. Ricardo maintains that children's health depends largely on the emotional health of their parents and the ecosystem of care provided by the program. Jakairá’s services are designed to meet multiple interrelated needs: supporting adolescents to return to or continue their education, access contraception and sexual education, establish income pathways, and build respectful relationships. In 2024, 34 children attended Kaleidos’s nurseries with 80% attendance, 10 adolescents returned to school, and others pursued vocational or tertiary training. Ricardo and his team designed longitudinal evaluations of the impact of their approach, identifying data that speaks for themselves: 65% of graduates are employed, and 50% of adolescents have completed secondary school. 93% of children attend medical checkups, and 95% of children are enrolled in school.

Kaleidos’ approach also includes training adolescents as promotores comunitarios who engage with schools, health centers, and child protection systems to foster more empathetic, youth-centered institutional responses. This bottom-up approach helps reframe how institutions understand and interact with adolescent parents. In 2024, over 1,000 adolescents and 160 adults participated in awareness activities through the engagement of local institutions among the promotores comunitarios.

To scale this work, Ricardo and his team created Red MAPA, a national network that enables civil society organizations and local governments across Argentina to adapt and implement the Jakairá model in their own contexts. From the outset, they designed the model to be replicable and responsive to diverse territorial contexts. The process begins with six months of online training, followed by the development of a local adaptation strategy and three years of technical support from Kaleidos. Each participating organization forms a core team—typically one decision-maker and two frontline workers—ensuring that both strategic and operational perspectives shape implementation, even in resource-constrained settings.
Since 2017, Kaleidos has led 14 editions of this training, reaching more than 2,000 participants, including 900 professionals from Argentina’s Secretariat for Children, Adolescents, and Families (SENAF), who invited the organization to strengthen their approach to working with adolescent parents. As part of the training, organizations are challenged to design their own projects during the last two months and begin implementation with Kaleidos’ support. Evaluation and monitoring are integrated throughout, based on Kaleidos’ participatory methodology.

The network currently includes 17 civil society organizations and 12 municipalities, including the city of Mercedes (Buenos Aires), which has successfully replicated all four pillars of the model: health, sexual education, life project development, and educational and labor inclusion. In addition to the structured training, Red MAPA offers continuous learning spaces focused on emerging issues related to adolescence, caregiving, and rights. Peer-to-peer exchange, impact measurement, and contextual innovation are at the heart of this expansion strategy, helping to build a more robust ecosystem of care for adolescent mothers and fathers throughout the country. In 2018, Ricardo participated in the national working group convened by SENAF to develop the policy on unintentional pregnancy interruption, ensuring that the voices and perspectives of adolescents were represented in the design of public guidelines.

A recent new step for scaling the prevention and education component is Sin Filtro, a public-private partnership with Farmacity and the Public Guardian’s Office, which transformed 20 pharmacies into safe, adolescent-friendly access points for confidential sexual and reproductive health advice. Volunteer professionals were trained to care for adolescents and since pharmacies are a common reference of healthcare in the country, Ricardo leverages their proximity to expand the reach of support. Simply by having staff wear a pin that says “Ask me any questions,” he creates new entry points where young people feel empowered to seek help. These strategies reflect Kaleidos’s broader vision: a society where public policy, services, and community life converge to ensure that every adolescent parent—not just those in major cities—can count on the conditions to raise their children and lead fulfilling lives.

As part of their broader strategy to influence systems and share knowledge, Ricardo and the Kaleidos team have built key alliances that amplify the reach and depth of their work. Three years ago, they helped launch a Latin American network made up of nine organizations from across the region that work with adolescents, creating a space for mutual learning and exchange of practices. In parallel, they convened a network of adolescent mothers through five dedicated gatherings, where participants set the agenda and collectively explore issues central to their lives—an approach that ensures young people remain at the heart of the solution.

Their expertise has also led UNICEF to invite Kaleidos to co-develop projects, including a pilot model for promoting perinatal mental health within public hospitals. This initiative aimed to strengthen maternal care by training obstetricians and nurses in public maternity wards and establishing a broader hospital-based support network. Across these interventions, a unifying goal is to break the social isolation often experienced by adolescent parents by embedding them in networks of care that are responsive, inclusive, and empowering.

Since its inception, Fundación Kaleidos has made public policy advocacy a central pillar of its strategy, combining grassroots evidence with decision-making spaces. Under Ricardo’s leadership, the organization has been a member of the Advisory Council for the National Plan for the Prevention of Unintentional Adolescent Pregnancy (Plan ENIA) since its launch, promoting an agenda that acknowledges and supports young people who are already parents. In partnership with UNICEF and the Senate of the Province of Buenos Aires, Kaleidos organized a Deliberative Dialogue on the Social Determinants of Early Childhood Development and supports the implementation of local parenting programs for adolescent families across several provinces. The foundation also actively engages in key networks, including the Executive Committee of RACI, the INSPIRE global initiative, the Infancia en Deuda coalition, the Youth Collective, and UNICEF’s Early Childhood Development Coalition, strengthening its advocacy efforts from the ground up.

Ricardo’s path into social entrepreneurship began with his deep sensitivity to inequality and human suffering, a perspective that took root during his university years. While studying molecular biology at the University of Buenos Aires in the early 1980s, he became actively involved in the student movement. In 1984, he co-founded a group aligned with both the Peronist Youth and the Communist Youth, and as an elected delegate, led extracurricular commissions that worked in low-income neighborhoods in the south of the city—an experience that shaped his belief in community-based action and public health as a civic responsibility.

After medical school, Ricardo pursued a psychiatric residency at the public Hospital Evita in Lanús, where Argentina was beginning to pioneer joint hospitalization of mothers and infants. There, he developed a growing interest in infant and child psychiatry and started taking on a major role in the early care of his own daughter. These personal and professional experiences laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to caregiving and child development.
In 1996, Ricardo moved to New York, where a seven-month clinical rotation turned into a three-year specialization in child psychiatry. He trained under Aurora Pérez, whose focus on prevention and family-centered care strongly influenced his approach. Upon returning to Argentina, he continued his education with renowned supervisor Salvador Celia, deepening his understanding of infant psychopathology, community empathy, and resilience—principles that would become core vectors in his later work.

His entire career of excellent training, combined with his experiences in public hospitals, led him to create the Kaleidos Foundation to provide support to children and adolescents who are most deprived of care and attention. Kaleidos’ first major project focused on providing training in public hospitals for young professionals. Ricardo and his team developed both an optional curriculum and a full residency program in public health–oriented mental health, sustained over five years. His commitment to building generational bridges, embedding mental health in public systems, and constructing protective institutional frameworks became hallmarks of his leadership.

Along the way, Ricardo helped launch Argentina’s first pediatric cancer registry and contributed to establishing the legal and administrative groundwork for sustained institutional change. His personal, academic, and political experiences converge in his leadership at Fundación Kaleidos, where he now dedicates his full professional life after stepping away from medical practice. Through its pioneering program, Jakairá—inspired by the Convention on the Rights of the Child—the initiative reframes young parents not as passive beneficiaries but as individuals capable of shaping their futures. By building interdisciplinary teams and forging cross-sector alliances, Ricardo has created a sustainable model that empowers adolescent families while driving systemic change from the ground up.