In 2023, the La Caixa Foundation contributed a total of 106 million euros to social action programs in the city of Barcelona, three million more than the previous year. It was made public yesterday by the mayor Jaume Collboni and the general director of the foundation, Antoni Vila Bertran, during the signing ceremony of the agreement that includes the collaboration between the two institutions in matters of social action, education , culture and research.
At the meeting, Collboni and Vila Bertran expressed the will of both parties to enhance collaboration, which is part of the improvement of relations between the public administration and the private sector that the government that presides over wants to promote 'socialist mayor "The agreement, the result of public-private co-responsibility, is born from the conviction that a society only progresses efficiently if advances reach everyone and improve people's lives", said Collboni.
"This agreement allows us to strengthen the collaboration between Fundació La Caixa and Barcelona City Council to work together. We want to combine efforts to improve the well-being of citizens in the social, educational, cultural and research fields and focus on the most vulnerable: care for children and people at risk or in a situation of exclusion ”, added the director general of Fundació La Caixa.
One of the most prominent social action programs is CaixaProinfància, which fights child poverty. Throughout 2023, it has served 6,754 children and more than 4,500 families, with an investment of 7.5 million euros in aid.
The job placement projects, on the other hand, have created more than 4,000 jobs in Barcelona, thanks to the collaboration of 120 companies in the city and 42 social entities, which are responsible for developing the program.
The program for Comprehensive Care for People with Advanced Illnesses attended to 2,944 patients and their families thanks to the work of three psychosocial care teams operating in five hospitals and five nursing homes in Barcelona. To this must be added the work of the School of Caregivers, in the district of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, and the program for the elderly, which has reached nearly 34,000 Barcelona residents, who have participated in the 1,464 activities promoted in the 50 centers of elderly people where it develops.
Other programs that have grown in 2023 are those aimed at social entities that are dedicated to caring for vulnerable groups; the work of the Fundació de l'Esperança with people at risk of poverty and social exclusion, and Reincorpora, aimed at the socio-labor insertion of people deprived of their freedom. Another important milestone has been the start of the construction of the CaixaResearch Institute, which with an investment of nearly 100 million euros will be the first research center specialized in immunology in Spain and one of the first in Europe. And as far as the cultural sphere is concerned, we should highlight the record number of visitors to the CosmoCaixa Science Museum (1,266,989, 54.7% more than the previous year) and the 483,852 to CaixaForum on its twentieth anniversary.
