“Pensamiento creativo y acción social innovadora”, by Sílvia Navarro, is the book that has just come out and that we recommend for this Saint George Day. You can buy it now on the CCS publisher’s website with a 5% discount and they will also send it free of charge at home or at work. To get a first tasting, you can download the index and the introduction in our iSocial library.

The sociologist and social worker Sílvia Navarro, collaborator of the iSocial Foundation, analyzes in this ambitious 541-page book the need for the social action sector to rethink and innovate today, and at the same time offers us clues and tools practices how to do it. And also accompanied by magnificent illustrations by the cartoonist Laia Giné.

The book has been written based on the reflection and materials used by Silvia Navarro for years in her workshops and seminars on creativity and innovation in the field of social action. Navarro proposes to recover a critical, involved, creative, innovative, transformative social action, because many signals indicate that there are many challenges that no longer support waiting, that there is no alternative, because the alternatives are waiting to be created by us. According to her, “there are other avenues for social action, another way of understanding and doing it, of living it to fill it with life. We have not run out of paths, but we have to change them, we have to create them because the usual ones no longer lead us. “

Sílvia Navarro’s book is and will be a reference book for those who believe in the importance and need of innovation in the field of social action; an invitation to travel, to imagine, to dare, to try and to experiment, to let “things happen” in the social action sector.

The Board of the iSocial Foundation, gathered on-line, have put together on April 14 the reflections of their members regarding the current crisis of COVID-19. The result of this first reflection has resulted in the adoption of a Declaration and a work plan in response to the pandemic and its consequences.

The adopted Declaration emphasizes the impact that current measures of confinement and the subsequent crisis situation will have on the most vulnerable citizens, due to the significant tensions that our economies will have to face, and the resources available for Social Policies and Services. And he recalls the need to foster, more than ever, the transformations in the sector that have been repeatedly diagnosed.

The founders, partners and collaborators of iSocial are experiencing, from the beginning of the pandemic, the difficulties of managing the collapse and the enormous shortcomings of the Social Services system in areas such as the residential, home care, guardianship, childhood protection, mental health or drugs. The crisis of COVID-19 has shown the low robustness of the system, its invisibility, planning deficits or the failure of social and health coordination.

iSocial is still working these days, despite its confinement, to carry out projects and activities that drive changes that are already essential to our Social Services system. Both keeping the projects that were already underway and pushing for new ones.

On Tuesday March 10, 2020 the closing conference of the reflection cycle “Big data and Social Services” took place, organized by the iSocial Foundation, by Fernando Fantova, doctor in sociology expert in Social Services and former Deputy Minister of the Basque Government.

With a full capacity for many days before, the nearly 200 people gathered in the auditorium of the Palau Macaya in Barcelona had the opportunity to follow Mr. Fantova around the challenge that Big Data and artificial intelligence pose for the Social Services sector today. The conference was presented and moderated by Montse Cervera, president of the iSocial Foundation, who introduced the topic after a welcome by Mr. Josep Ollé, director of the Palau Macaya; Toni Codina, director of the iSocial Foundation; Marta Aymerich, vice-rector of the UOC; and Yolanda Lupiáñez, director of digital transformation at the TIC Salut Social Foundation.

With the title “Social services facing the intelligence of large amounts of data (big data)”, Fantova offered his vision, always sharp and clairvoyant, on the impact that this technological innovation can have on social welfare systems. First, according to Fantova, it will help to show that the activity of allocating resources to people with subsistence needs, which data analysis can make more objective and even automate, does not have to continue to be managed from Social Services. And on the other, it will allow Social Services to focus on the other activity that is more proper to it: ensuring care and support for people to develop and complement their autonomy for decisions and activities of daily life in family and community relationships. And not only that, but in this area it will make the evaluations of the various disciplines involved more intelligent.

According to Fantova, these advances, which data intelligence can boost, are essential since otherwise the current model of Social Services is unscalable: it will not be possible to universalize, if it does not incorporate more technology, while at the same time promoting community networks.

Next, Fantova explored in more detail in what aspects Big data can provide promising impacts for the improvement of the Social Services system: the provision of evidence that facilitates and improves the work of professionals in identifying results, factors and interventions effective; a better positioning, communication and capillarity of the public network in the territory; the vertical integration of the various Social Services, to facilitate people’s itineraries; horizontal integration with other systems depending on people’s needs; and the generation of an ecosystem of knowledge and evidence on successful practices that can be scalable.

Fantova exemplified in public home care services what data intelligence can contribute in the near future: proactive segmentation and geolocation based on indicators of functional and relational fragility, and contextual factors of housing, urban, economic and services; flexibility, territorialization and self-management in services; diversification and integration of home interventions, in the open environment, in equipment, advanced telecare or others; initiatives to integrate social and health services in homes and the community in different situations and life cycle transitions; walk towards a continuum between home and non-home social services in a context of more diversity of housing alternatives; and synergies between community care and community action.

In short, according to Fantova, it is about using technology, as other sectors have done, so that it acts as a lever for the improvements that the Social Services system needs today: advance in the personalization of interventions, in economic efficiency, in organizational integration, in collaborative dynamics, in preventive impact, in social legitimation, in ethical quality, in democratic governance and in the political universalization of Social Services.

The reflection cycle “Big Data and Social Services” will close with a final summary document of the entire cycle, which the iSocial Foundation will send to the more than 400 people who have participated in the various activities organized between September 2019 and March 2020. At the moment, the presentation used by Fernando Fantova in his conference can be downloaded now.

The UPF campus in Poblenou will host the first working session of the European project from 11 to 13 February. The iSocial Foundation is attending the meeting, along with 14 other project partner organizations from Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece and the Czech Republic. From Catalonia, the Immigration Secretariat of the Generalitat, the technology company Everis, and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), which are leading the project, are also partners. The coordinator is Dr. Leo Wanner, ICREA professor and researcher at UPF.

Welcome is a Horizon 2020 project with a budget of more than 4 million euros from the European Union and lasting three years (2020-2022).

The Welcome project aims to research and develop smart technologies to support the reception and integration of newcomers to Europe. It will offer personalized solutions of a psychological and social nature, satisfactory to both migrants and public administrations.

The app application that will be created in the project will help newcomers at the time of their arrival, but also during the adaptation and inclusion process, responding to their most frequent demands.

The application will be developed in contexts of registration, orientation, language teaching, civic education and social inclusion, all of which are adapted to the profile of the partners and through immersive and augmented reality virtual technologies. The results of the project will be validated in order to show their portability in different European contexts. Within the project, the main task of the iSocial Foundation will be to manage the taste and experimentation of prototypes and the final technological instrument in Catalonia with newcomers from different origins.

Welcome is an example of the type of innovation projects that we promote or participate in from the iSocial Foundation, both for the goals it pursues, for its international dimension, and because it is the result of the collaboration of diverse agents, more beyond the social sector: universities, technology companies, public administrations, etc.

On February 5, we have inaugurated the “Postgraduate course in Public Management of Local Social Services” of the Catalan Association of Municipalities (ACM), the University of Barcelona and the iSocial Foundation, addressed to the managers and technicians of Social Services of the 937 city councils associated with the ACM.

The opening lecture of the course was given by Alfonso Lara Montero, director of the European Social Network (ESN), the European network that groups public institutions across Europe that manage Social Services.

“The Priorities Today in Innovation and Transformation of Social Services in Europe” was the title of the conference by the director of the ESN, who gave a brilliant presentation on this subject, based on a thorough knowledge of the situation of Social Services in the various territories and countries of the European environment. Current innovation and transformation trends and priorities are, according to Alfonso L. Montero, in topics such as integrated care, service digitalization, evidence-based practice, predictive analytics, co-production, and participation. of the users, the recruitment and training of professionals, the provision, contracting and public-private collaboration, etc.

This edition of the postgraduate course will be taught every Wednesday, from February 5 to December 16, 2020. You can find more information here and on the ACM website.