When this newspaper tries to speak for the first time with Majo Gimeno, founder of Mamás en Acción, she takes a turn as a volunteer at the hospital to take care of a little one. "Impossible now," she replies. In that three-hour time that she spends with the little one, she sits next to her bed and gives him love, the only two challenges of the volunteers that make up this association born in Valencia a decade ago. “I always say that we are the children's activists, because nobody bets on them”, Gimeno slides.
It was 2013. Majo Gimeno lived closely the financial crisis, as he worked in banking. She overwhelmed by the situation, she recently became a mother, she tells of her that she took the cart and her baby and started walking. She thus arrived at the church of San Nicolas, a place of pilgrimage in Valencia and where she had not returned since she went with her grandmother. “The parish priest told me that mine were not problems, that there were worse ones. And he told me about a boy who was alone in the hospital and nobody could take care of him. I didn't get it out of my head, ”she recalls. But she couldn't help him. She ruminated for many days that early loneliness that she transformed into an association, founded with 30 euros and the solidarity signature of four friends, to be able to enter hospital centers and now, yes, to be able to care for the most vulnerable.
Since then the association has carried out more than 600 accompaniments and has a network of more than 3,000 volunteers that will grow again when at the end of this month they also begin to work in Seville. They already have a queue of 300 people waiting to become volunteers. They operate in a dozen hospitals in Madrid, also in Alicante, Barcelona, Castelló, Las Palmas and in their hometown, Valencia, where the City Council awarded them the city's Gold Medal last October.
But, far from glorifying the awards, Majo Gimeno insists on his vindictive facet, saying that Mamás en Acción fixes problems that "the Administration has not been able to solve and that it looks the other way." He usually says it in the offices of the Ministry of Equality, in the hands of Compromís since the Botànic began to sail, but he also told the Popular Party when it was in power. “We get along very well with all the directors of the ministries where we are, but we tell them what's up. It cannot be that there are children alone, ”he insists.
They collaborate with public hospitals, from where they are called when an unaccompanied minor is hospitalized. That he does so can only be due to three reasons: one, that he is a child from a family in social exclusion, whose parents have had to leave him for survival; two, that it is a foster child who lives in a children's residence; or three, that he is a mistreated minor who the Justice prevents anyone who knows him from approaching him so as not to violate evidence or his testimony.
“When Moms in Action began in 2013, there were 43,000 children in care, today there are 57,000. The scenario is not encouraging, every year there are more children without parents in Spain, which is a drama; And of these, 6,000 are in the Valencian Community, but they are not talked about, nor is foster care disseminated or disseminated, ”denounces the founder of the association. The Child Protection Bulletin, to which Gimeno alludes to provide data and issued by the Government, has 13,419 open files on minors with protection measures in the Valencian Community (2021 data).
In spirit, they are a public utility association, which is why they have the same status as a foundation, but in practice they function like a social startup, details the founder. Her speech is very clear, there is motivation, teamwork, remuneration of the staff (5 full-time people and another three short-time) and the search for monetization, since Mamás en Acción only accepts that 20% of its budget comes from public subsidies.
That business profile that they maintain is also observed in their Council, which includes local businessmen from Valencia who behaved like investors and did not let the entity fall when economic needs and lack of resources affected its solvency. They meet with them once a month.
They enter the hospital when they are called, during the day they do 2-3 hour shifts, at night, all in a row and they only leave the accompaniment when the minor is discharged. They do not filter into the pathology because "these children do not have anyone's resources, so we can spend uninterrupted months accompanying the child," she says. From that company, and that attachment that is generated, the proposal to welcome many of the children has come generously, more than 20% of its volunteers have taken that courageous step.
But it's not enough, he insists. For this reason, its "Not a single child" campaign, which goes beyond hospital stays and aims to ensure that there are no minors in foster care. Meanwhile, they will put on the mask, as they already did in the pandemic, and will continue to enter the room to strengthen the health, with love and affection, of the weakest little ones.
