In 2007, the La Caixa Foundation began the Proinfancia social program, a project whose main objective is to break hereditary poverty and help families who are at risk of poverty and social exclusion.
Through a network of 450 social entities in Spain, this program offers educational reinforcement, a leisure space for the little ones and also helps with bureaucratic procedures, in the search for work and in strengthening family ties between parents and their parents. children. During 2023, around 65,000 children and adolescents and around 40,000 families will be served by this project, which has a budget of 66 million euros.
Since 2012, the Fundació Idea, in the Torre-romeu neighborhood of Sabadell, is one of the entities that offers this program to its neighbors. “We agreed to participate in the project because La Caixa guaranteed us the development of services and at the same time stability and economic security,” says Loli Rodríguez, the general director of the foundation.
This entity develops educational support workshops for primary and secondary school students, as well as psychotherapeutic care services for families and children, and with an open center to accompany minors in the afternoons and in summer a day center or camps. One of the latest workshops that they have recently launched is called baobab and aims to reduce the social vulnerability of families, increase family skills and the development of newborns by applying Montessori pedagogy.
Regarding the profile of families, in general “they have a low economic level and at the same time we find immigrant or single-parent families who do not have the necessary resources,” says Rodríguez.
To date, there have been 17 editions of this program, but each course of the project has a different duration depending on the topic. The educational reinforcement takes place during the school year, however, there are family habits workshops that last from three to nine months.
Another service that families have is a La Caixa card with financial aid for health-related issues and also for food. However, they have to pass the supervision of a social worker to make the purchase.
From the Fundació Idea, a good evaluation is made of the project and its execution. “In these twelve years, we have managed to offer assistance to many disadvantaged families and the possibility of generating change and having a real impact on their lives in a very positive way,” explains Rodríguez. Furthermore, looking to the future, it proposes a remodeling of the current project or a new program to “help those families that are not so precarious, which are many and in the end we have to say no to them because there are those that are in a worse situation.” .
