The Spanish Red Cross is a humanitarian organization that works “for and with” people and social groups that experience various kinds of discrimination, poverty and social exclusion.
The institution´s commitment is backed by a strategy that aims to maximize the capacities of the most vulnerable people and social groups in their daily lives, encouraging their individual and collective autonomies and full integration into society.
We, at the Red Cross, are interested in learning about the social reality in which we live and with which we work. Through our different social programs and projects, we interact yearly with hundreds of thousands of people. In addition to this work, we have been developing socially-minded research projects related to situations of social exclusion.
We believe that the practical experience that we gain from our work, territorial scope of our network, diversity of the activities and projects that we manage and knowledge and expertise of our human resources - which include both our technical professionals and our volunteers - gives us an obligation to deepen our analysis by developing a systematic study that aims to be a sociological "picture" of the people with whom we intervene who are in situations or at risk of social exclusion.
Through the Annual Report on Social Vulnerability, presented here in its first edition, we hope to collect information that will allow us to improve our work and provide reliable information to those who, in terms of policy design, serve as the guarantors of the rights of citizens. We also seek to make a contribution towards raising social awareness about the circumstances that affect the most disadvantaged people living in our country.
On a periodic basis and following a standardized format - which will be maintained over time in order to facilitate the comparison of findings the Annual Report on Social Vulnerability offers first-hand statistical information, derived from up-to-date and individualized records of people who participate in many of the Spanish Red Cross´s Social Intervention projects and programs throughout the country. This broad database of nominal information, which - at the time of publication - includes more than 150,000 records, is called the "Social Intervention Application" or AIS (Aplicación de Intervención Social).
The AIS was designed with two main objectives: to obtain statistical data and improve the quality of the intervention. Thanks to this instrument, information can be obtained on: personal, gender, health, economic, social, familial and relational factors, among others, based on a multidimensional approach towards social exclusion. The theoretical basis for the Application comes from research on Patterns of Social Exclusion in Europe, carried out by the Red Cross between 2001 and 2002, with support from the European Commission. The precedent for its methodology is the Red Cross´s Implementation of the Employment Plan for Vulnerable Groups.
Through this report we hope to fill any possible gaps that there may be in this area of research and provide a solid base of information for intervention with vulnerable people by the actors that carry out duties in this area, ranging from socially-oriented entities to public social services and training center, as well as the adoption of political lines of action for social welfare by public organisms. Moreover, each report will focus on a particular subject, which in this case is Dependency.
Through projects like the Annual Report on Social Vulnerability we pledge our commitment to reflection, debate, applied research and the participation of all social actors, experts, professionals and, particularly, the very people who live in situations of vulnerability, in order to continuously be able to improve our work on behalf of social inclusion and, above all, to fight against the risks of exclusion, i.e. a process of social, economic and relational separation that seriously undermines peoples rights and dignity.
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