The Madrid district of Latina will have the first Independent Living Office for persons with intellectual disabilities in Spain. This will begin to work “in the summer of 2021” giving service 24 hours a day, as announced today by the delegate of Families, Equality and Social Welfare.
Social workers and psychologists will provide personalized support to each user to carry out daily tasks, administrative procedures or participation in different educational or leisure activities. In this way, the office will support them, “but being very clear that they are the ones who must make their own decisions,” says the area delegate Pepe Aniorte. “It is about avoiding the institutionalization that occurs when they enter other types of resources.”
This is precisely the goal, that persons with intellectual disabilities enjoy greater autonomy, “so that they can be masters of their lives,” they explain from the area, from where they remember that it is a “pioneer” service, since, although there are offices of this type for people with other disabilities, “they have hardly had any development in the field of intellectual disability.”
The Office for Independent Living is the result of a process of citizen participation, carried out in two different phases: one internal, within the Plena Inclusión Madrid associative movement, and another external, belonging to the participatory budgeting process of the Madrid City Council. The project for the creation of the Office for Independent Living passed a previous phase in which it was among the 10 projects most supported by the residents of Madrid and obtained 3,297 votes in the final phase.
