In Spain, one of each three minors is in a situation of poverty or at risk of social exclusion; for this reason, the Fundación Balia, whose work we have been supporting since 2005, has been working towards providing them with a dignified future. This collaboration has helped take care of over two hundred children between 5 and 7 years of age, as well as offer IT workshops to over nine hundred people of different ages.
The organisation initiated its journey in 2001 under the slogan “Close help” with the aim of providing support to families with scarce resources and fighting against the feeling of abandonment felt by their children, although, in recent years, the beneficiaries' profile has expanded to children whose families have serious problems to cover their basic needs due to unemployment.
The objective is to provide minors with the necessary tools to avoid this situation of disadvantage from having an impact on their performance at school or socially isolating them; in short, breaking the circle of poverty in which they currently find themselves. The company also takes care of older people or the unemployed that need basic training in new technologies, which are nowadays essential for finding work or carrying out any type of paper work.
The over three hundred volunteers that collaborate in this initiative take care of the minors that come to these centres (a total of six distributed across Spain), and they also install Balia classrooms in some of the schools, where the same programmes are delivered as there but making good use of the facilities that they are offered.