The mayor of San Sebastián, Jon Insausti, held a meeting this Thursday with the collective Kaleko Afari Solidarioak (KAS) after the City Council decided to eliminate since last Tuesday the "solidarity dinners" aimed at people without resources. In this context, the mayor reiterated the need to promote "integral solutions" and to advance in "real inclusion processes" to respond to this reality.
Insausti detailed that the meeting with KAS, lasting almost two hours, took place in a "cordial and respectful" atmosphere, in which the "goodwill" of all parties to face the "great global challenge that homelessness represents" was evident, a phenomenon that "transcends Donostia" and requires "inter-institutional co-responsibility and territorial balance."
The Donostian mayor pointed out that "there are social initiatives that, from the best of intentions, do not achieve the common goal of helping people integrate into the city," due to the lack of "an organizational framework, nor a stable coordination structure with the public system." In his view, "without shared planning, evaluation, and individualized pathways, little or nothing is achieved to undertake a life project."
Likewise, he emphasized that "when a need acquires a structural character," the response "must be oriented towards the search for integral solutions and the search for real inclusion processes" and considered that "all this requires specialized professionals, institutional coordination, and organized and stable public co-responsibility."
After highlighting that "the addressing of situations of social exclusion cannot rest exclusively on voluntary initiative," Insausti insisted that "solidarity dignifies a society." In this sense, he stressed that institutions "have an even greater responsibility: to turn that solidarity into opportunities."
He also defended that public policies "must be ordered, humane, sustainable, cooperative, personalized, and results-oriented" because "the true success of a social policy does not consist in a person receiving help every day, it consists in that, thanks to the shared commitment between the administration and the person themselves, a moment arrives when they no longer need it."
The first mayor committed to allocate more municipal resources to be able to assist 416 people with food, as long as they are registered in the San Sebastián Social Services system and there is "a commitment to work in the personalized inclusion process, in order to develop their life project in the city." "Donostia commits to accompany all these people and for them to assume rights and obligations that must be fulfilled," he reiterated.
Insausti recalled that public administrations "have a responsibility different from that of any voluntary initiative" and that their policies must be capable of "transforming immediate aid into a real process of inclusion."
"Recognizing the value of solidarity does not mean renouncing to organize the public response," he emphasized, adding that "it means precisely the opposite: assuming that when a need becomes structural, the institutional response must also do so."
For this reason, he reiterated that "the approach to social exclusion cannot be addressed without planning, outside of organizational frameworks or stable coordination structures with the public system."
In his final intervention, he stated that "security cannot have a vision only from the police sphere, but it cannot be ignored either. It must also have a vision of coexistence, and this constitutes the main foundation of a social policy, like the rest of the compliance with norms and regulations necessary for order in a democratic society."
KAS REQUEST
For his part, the spokesperson for KAS, Agus Rodríguez, explained to the media at the end of the meeting that they requested the mayor to lift the ban on distributing solidarity dinners until the municipal alternative of offering one hundred additional dinners to people without resources through the "Otorduak" program is up and running, a proposal that Insausti "has refused."
As Rodríguez specified, during the meeting they spoke "in a correct tone." "The first request was to temporarily suspend the decision to ban the dinners, but it has been a 'resounding no' and the City Council reaffirms its decision of total prohibition of the dinners." For the moment, there are no new meetings scheduled between the Donostiarra City Council and KAS, which will now evaluate what steps to take from this moment on.