On October 15 in Barcelona, the iSocial Foundation and other 8 other organizations have taken the kick-off meeting of the project “App for adolescents and young people migrated alone”. The project will develop and experience a package of digital tools, which will be accessible through an App for mobile phones, that may be useful in the future to about 4,000 adolescents and young people migrated alone who are in Catalonia and who receive a socio-educational support by the Catalan’s care and protection system, both under-guardianship, and over 18 years of age; both boys, and girls.

The objective of the project is to contribute to the innovation in the existing care model, in line with line 4 of the “Catalan Strategy for the welcome and inclusion of Children and Young people migrated alone”, in January of 2019. This Strategy aims to “create tools and conditions to welcome and include in society and empower children and young people migrated alone, from a community perspective”. And the project will contribute to this aim through the experimentation of a technological tools that facilitates the development of a non-contact socio-educational intervention model that complements the current model, considering that all adolescents and young migrants they have today an smartphone.

The growing arrival in Catalonia of these teenagers and young people in recent years has raised a challenge of enormous magnitude and extreme difficulty for the care and protection system, because the difficulties that they experience from their arrival to their full emancipation and inclusion are only partially attended and satisfied with current resources. That is why there is consensus among professionals and experts, that innovation in this area of social action is now urgent and necessary to find solutions to the limitations and difficulties of the existing model. The App and the digital tools that will include will be intended to become a new socio-educational resource of the care and protection system, in order to help solve the needs of reception, network support, empowerment, emancipation and inclusion in the society of these adolescents and young people.

In addition to the iSocial Foundation that leads the project, the other 8 organizations involved are the following:

• University of Barcelona (UB) / School of Social Work
• Open University of Catalonia (UOC) / Degree in Computing, Multimedia and Telecommunications
• Idea Foundation
• Punt of Referencia Association
• Sant Pere Claver Group
• Unió de Joves Extutelats de Catalunya
• Save The Children Foundation
• Víctor Grífols i Lucas Foundation

The project has the initial funding of the Fèlix Llobet Nicolau Foundation, and the support of the Secretariat of Children, Adolescents and Youth of the Catalan Government.

In a debate organized by the iSocial Foundation, the invited experts agreed on the importance of developing and promoting national and local communication strategies to explain and value Social Services, mainly primary care from the world local The lack of a clear identity, invisibility, or even a distorted and stigmatized image, are now a burden for responsible administrations and for professionals working in Social Services.

This was the main conclusion of the debate, held at the Pati Manning in Barcelona on October 10 with the title “Communicate better to change the image of Social Services.” Led by Víctor Puig, professor of communication at Pompeu Fabra University and expert in reputation management, the debate was attended by the Director General of Social Services of the Generalitat, Meritxell Benedí; the Basque expert in Social Services, Fernando Fantova; and the journalist responsible for social issues of the ARA Newspaper, Natàlia Vila. Among the public, there were mainly Social Services professionals from city councils and county councils.

The speakers spoke of the lack of definition of the Social Services system itself; of its lack of prestige, even inward doors, which causes professionals or some areas of the system to not feel it as their own; or a distorted social image that reduces it to charity or action against poverty. An image that is very far from the robust and universal system that it intends to be, designed to ensure that no one is left behind. The low economic value and the little social prestige of healing tasks, strongly feminized, are surely the origin of this collective imaginary. At the same time, communication deficiencies may also have to do with wanting to go unnoticed because an increase in demand is not sought.

The solution is to develop and implement communication plans for Social Services, both aimed at the professionals of the system, as well as to the general public, to explain what the system does and to provide prestige. The new Strategic Plan of Social Services of Catalonia is an opportunity to advance in this objective. The Social Services do very positive things and impels important advances (the example of the “social supercases” of Barcelona is put) that are not enough to know, the media do not speak to them, and society does not put them in value

This should allow social services to be seen by society as assets to preserve, at the same level as the health system or the educational system, and that it was so attractive for a political leader to photograph himself before a New Social Services equipment, as it is done in front of a new school or a magnetic resonance device of a hospital.

In the course of the event, some examples of communicative campaigns that were made in other places were shown to highlight the Social Services. Fernando Fantova provided three examples: a 2018 campaign of the Generalitat Valenciana; a video by Sara Buesa, Councilor of the City Council of Vitoria-Gasteiz, explaining what Social Services are; and a spot for the dissemination of the Social Services of Bilbao. On the other hand, Swedish-Catalan social worker Astrid Linström, a contributor to iSocial, contributed some examples of Sweden, as a campaign to prestige among young people the professions linked to Social Services; or a video to explain to the schoolchildren what Social Services do.

In partnership with the Pompeu Fabra University, which is leading the project, the Secretary of Immigration of the Generalitat of Catalonia, and the technology company Everis in Catalonia, and with 10 other organizations and companies from Galicia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece and the Czech Republic, the iSocial Foundation we have started an European Horizon2020 project aimed at developing a multilingual personal assistant who will help immigrants and refugees through the smartphone, at the time of arrival in Catalonia and during their adaptation process towards inclusion in our country. The project, which is called Welcome, has been selected by the Horizon program of the European Commission, will last for three years and it has a budget of four million euros.

The personal assistant that will develop Welcome will be experimented and implemented in the 5 participating countries and will be a voice system that will have language versions in the languages of the Mediterranean area and the Middle East where the main migratory flows now affects these five countries, in addition to Catalan and other European languages. The smartphone assistant should serve the immigrants and refugees to improve the knowledge of Catalan society and the processes of labor insertion, based on information appropriate to the profile of each person, and is expected to also respond to the most frequent demands of immigrants and refugees on many other issues. At the same time, the anonymised data that is collected will be used so that the administrations can develop policies more in accordance with the profiles of the people who finish arriving. Within the project, the main task of the iSocial Foundation will be to make the taste and experimentation of prototypes and the final technological instrument with immigrants and refugees from different origins.

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

Currently, and in parallel to Welcome, from the iSocial Foundation we are promoting other innovation projects for the social action sector of Catalonia, in collaboration with universities, administrations, social entities and diverse companies, in fields such as the improvement of local Social Services, the attention to adolescents and young people migrating alone, elderly people in a situation of unwanted loneliness, homeless people, young people with mental disorders, or people with intellectual disabilities.

You will soon have more information about the Welcome project in the project web portal and we will inform you about the developments and the progress of the project.

On Wednesday September 25, the iSocial Foundation opened the “Big Data and Social Services” reflection cycle, with a lecture by Rebecca Richmond, managing director of International Research and Insights at The Advisory Board Company (London), in the auditorium Palau Macaya in Barcelona. This company played a leading role in American healthcare reform, “Obamacare”, and became the international reference consultant for the improvement of the efficiency of socio-health systems, the financing of social services, and the coordination and integration of services based on a more scientific knowledge of the needs of the population.

In this inaugural conference, Mrs. Richmond answered the question of why with Big Data can we respond better to the needs of the citizens?. According to Richmond, in the first place because the Big Data allows us to know social needs that are not covered by the current welfare systems and to segment their social risk. But this implies, at the same time, overcoming the deficiencies of current systems to respond to these needs, due to compartmentalized attention between social, health and educational systems, and the inadequate use of existing data to better understand these needs. Richmond has proposed moving from the use of data to describe situations to the analysis of data to generate comprehensive valuable services based on evidence.

Richmond has remarked that the goal of introducing the Big Data in Social Services must be to allow citizens to participate in the improvement of their life project, placing them at the center of planning and management of services , making them involved in the decision making in the use of their data, and by graduating the services based on the segmentation in order to achieve self-management of the person.

Using Big Data, according to Richmond, allows to know aspects that are not clear or evident in the social care process that may be essential for the citizen. In this sense, she has put the example of the PAM scale, which in some places of the USA allows social and health professionals to know the degree of activation of the patients or users of the services and, therefore, to understand at what point they should start the conversation with him / her. She also explained the cases of the Voluntary Action Rotherham Funds of the United Kingdom and the Black Dog Institute of Australia, which use the Big Data and measurement and participation instruments to help professionals to diagnose.

Faced with the difficulties and barriers to using Big Data in Social Services, Richmond has put the example of the Montefiore Health System in New York, which is a worldwide referent in integrated care and use of the Big Data, which stated based on their firm belief and without waiting to receive any government commission. Although at the same time Montefiore achieved much more efficiency and resource savings, Rebecca Richmond remarked that it is a mistake to think that integrated attention and the development of more integrated and intelligent systems will ultimately lead to a saving of resources, although it will lead to rebalancing the cost between systems and flattening the curve of future growth of spending.

Finally, Rebecca Richmond recommended that the development of knowledge linked to the Big Data be used not so much to know the segment of high risk population that is already attended by Social Services, but that we focus efforts on the population segment (between 60% and 65% according to her) that is in a situation of “rising risk” and, within this, to the people (between 15% and 18%) that every year migrate to the group of higher risk, to try to reduce this percentage thanks to a more effective preventive and proactive work.

The cycle “Big Data and Social Services” will continue on October 29, with the debate How can we improve social services today thanks to Big Data, which will be carried out by Meritxell Benedí, Director General of Social Services, of the Department of Work, Social Affairs and Families, of the Generalitat of Catalonia, and Tomas Lehtinen, expert in Data Analytics of the public sector of Finland, among others. On November 19 will be the turn of the Dissertation on Predictive Models and automation in Social Services, opportunities and critical factors, with experts such as Albert Isern, CEO of Momentum Analytics and Josué Sallent, director of the TIC Social Health Foundation.

Also, on January 31, 2020, the workshop How to develop and use predictive models in local social services, where representatives of basic areas of social services will analyze the previous learning of some administrations in order to develop predictive models and apply -they in municipal and county social services. The cycle will close on March 10 with the presentation of a final document of conclusions and recommendations that will collect the contributions of the activities from the beginning of the cycle, and the conference: Limits and opportunities of the Big Data to improve social services, by the expert consultant in social services of the Basque Country Fernando Fantova.

This series of the iSocial Foundation has been organized with the support of Obra Social La Caixa, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the TIC Social Health Foundation.

The Minister of Labor, Social Affairs and Families of the Catalan Government, Chakir el Homrani, presented the base document for the Strategic Social Services 2020-2024 Plan, which aims to become a key instrument for reorganizing and updating the Catalan social services system and adapting it to sociodemographic, economic and technological changes. The Plan seeks to cohesion, streamline and universalize the system, which is more effective and that guarantees personalized attention and family and community interaction. To achieve this, the Department of Work, Social Affairs and Families promotes a participatory process to incorporate contributions of social agents involved in the base document.

The Plan must become the road map of social care for the period 2020-2024 and must respond to the current challenges. He wants to achieve a universal offer and direct social services to the general public, and at the same time articulate and organize to overcome current fragmentation and deploy an information, innovation, knowledge and research system.

In this area of ​​research and innovation, these will be their priority lines of action:

• Promotion of strategic alliances for the promotion and coordination of research, knowledge and innovation in social services with universities, research centers, third sector, industry, professional colleges and other agents.
• Promotion of collaboration networks to increase the capacity to carry out shared research and innovation projects.
• Agreement with the universities for the incorporation of competitions in research and innovation in the training curricula.
• Definition of the bases and publication of a public call for research in social services oriented to the priorities set by the PESS.
• Launching in conjunction with the social initiative of projects of technological and social innovation.
• Preparation of a map of technological solutions that improve the response to needs, access to the population and results.
• Start-up of innovative public procurement experiences.
• Creation of a system for collecting, recognizing, managing and disseminating knowledge and best practices based on the evidence of social services.
• Implementation of an observatory for innovation and good practices in social services.