Santa Coloma de Gramenet is a city of opportunities. And the Marie Curie Training Center is one of the most recent examples. In operation since last September, in this emblematic facility that transcends municipal boundaries, opportunities are translated into training and employment itineraries that seek to improve people’s qualifications and their access to decent and quality jobs.
With a feminist, innovative and sustainable vision, the space concentrates practically all the training offer that the Santa Coloma de Gramenet City Council, through the municipal economic promotion company Grameimpuls, makes available to citizens, especially those groups with greater difficulties in accessing the labor market, such as women in vulnerable situations, long-term unemployed, unemployed over 45 years of age, newcomers and young people. This year, around a thousand students will be trained at the CF Marie Curie.
The center occupies pavilion B of the old Hospital del EspÃritu Santo. A rehabilitated building with adjacent space for workshops of about 5,000 square meters in the Raval neighborhood. Its privileged location –between the municipalities of Barcelona, ​​Sant Adrià de Besòs and Badalona–, together with the concentration of resources and training and job orientation itineraries, both face-to-face and virtual, make the space an emblematic facility of regional reference and an element of highly relevant social and territorial cohesion.
The facility, which bears the name of Marie Curie in homage to the Polish scientist and Nobel Prize winner in Physics and Chemistry, this year offers some fifty subsidized courses that allow obtaining professional certificates of different levels and professional families. These are the specialties of administration and management, agriculture, electricity and electronics, energy and water, information technology and telecommunications, installations and maintenance, environment, community services, and recording and data management.
The training offer offered by the CF Marie Curie is in line with the demand of the labor market, with jobs that require recruiting personnel with training and specific skills related to sectors such as new technologies or renewable energy. In this sense, the program includes training itineraries for solar thermal installations and digital transformation.
Linked to ICT, the offer includes resources to break the digital and gender gap. Proof of this are the digitization courses for women or other resources that seek to promote the use and application of new technologies among citizens and the local productive fabric. A commitment to virtual training has also been made, with the implementation of the Integrated Human Resources Management professionalism certificate. It is the first step of many more to come.
And it is that work is being done to open teletraining to other professional families. But CF Marie Curie is much more than training equipment. In its facilities, there is a job orientation point, an ACTIC space to accredit people’s digital skills, a Mentor classroom with more than 200 online courses and a job skills accreditation service, as well as a technical team that advises and accompanies people in achieving their professional goals. It can also attend to entrepreneurial initiatives that can come from networking between the administrations and the social agents of the territory.
The courses taught are framed in five programs: Priority Areas Offer Training (FOAP); the Business Simulation Program for Educational Purposes (SEFED) for administrative management; the devices of the project Work in the neighborhoods –such as the Iria itinerary, aimed at women–; the Singular Program; the Dual FPO, and the House of Trades. These last three, aimed at young people from the territory. The training is financed by the Servei Públic d’Ocupació de Catalunya, the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy and the European Social Fund, and managed by the Santa Coloma City Council, through through Grameimpuls.
What is the Integrated Sustainable Urban Development Strategy, EDUSI? The Integrated Sustainable Urban Development Strategy, EDUSI, was born as a result of the strategic analysis carried out throughout the year 2015 with the aim of being able to know the challenges that the city had to face between the years 2015 and 2025. The work carried out was organized into a comprehensive strategy to be able to respond to the many needs detected. Santa Coloma de Gramenet obtained the highest recognition in the first call for FEDER operating funds, a very competitive call from the European Union. Thus, it was one of the two Catalan towns selected from among the more than 25 presented. European funds endowed EDUSI with 15 million euros, to which were added 15 million more from municipal financing, with which 24 large city projects are financed, of the Santa Coloma of the future.
Having access to the European Regional Development Funds (FEDER) for sustainable growth in the 2014-2020 period has allowed the city to develop urban regeneration projects, taking special care of environmental and social aspects. The projects for Santa Coloma de Gramenet are specified in different thematic operations (OP), which are: smart city (OT 02), sustainable city (OT 04), healthy city (OT 06) and inclusive city (OT 09).
The city promotes a great transformation with the EDUSI project, which has involved a million-dollar investment in services, equipment and reforms such as the CIBA, Paseo de la Salzereda or the Marie Curie Training Center. Other interventions that have benefited from European funds have been the different street developments, the rehabilitation of buildings through the Urban Conservation and Rehabilitation Areas program, the expansion and improvement of the Torre Balldovina Museum, the new lighting in neighborhoods such as of the third district, the new room 092 of the Local Police and the comprehensive reform of the Pavelló Esportiu Municipal Nou.
The objective is to make Santa Coloma de Gramenet a smarter, healthier, more inclusive, participatory, efficient city, protective of the environment and in the fight against poverty and for equal opportunities between men and women, turning city projects into reality. presented to the European Union and linked to the commitments of the Municipal Action Plan (PAM), the Urban and Sustainable Mobility Plan and the Pedestrian Neighborhoods project, among others.
