Approximation of Fernando Sabin to the call Madrid Escucha

A few weeks ago, we visited Nou Barris, a popular district in the outskirts of Barcelona, to present the Mares de Madrid project. Far from the incessant flow of tourism that is imposed on Barcelona, it is home to one of the greatest exponents of the city's self-organised reality. The Ateneu Popular 9 Barris, with forty years of neighbourhood struggle for dignity behind it, is a reality that shocks you when you see it and especially when you hear it. The story they tell you tells of a long process of neighbourhood struggle for the dignity of a neighbourhood in which listening to the local administration was important to make possible the social centre of reference in the performing arts and community development that it is today.

Bringing this example to Madrid can serve to highlight what for me is the main contribution of Madrid Escucha. An administration is more intelligent if it knows how to recognise in the citizens and, by extension, in its workers, the capacity to imagine, create and develop changes in the city that improve their lives and, furthermore, provides the necessary means to make the processes and the changes they entail possible. Madrid Escucha is a new channel, not the only one, in which, based on this recognition of the power of the social sphere, a further step is taken and the interests and knowledge of public workers are proactively brought together so that they can propose and collaborate with the social sphere in order to produce changes in the city.

And this is what the nine projects that have been selected in Madrid Escucha, to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the institution by providing a framework that allows working on responses to needs, problems or situations that can be addressed and improved through citizen action in cooperation with the city council. The challenges are that the selected proposals have sufficient support to become the transformative reality they are intended to be and that the channels that allow public workers to propose and develop improvements are a structural and uncalled-for reality.

As a mentor, I will try to support these initiatives as much as I can, contributing my specialised knowledge in social economy and trying to connect them with other valuable and complementary experiences that are already taking place in Madrid. One of them is the Mares project, a commitment to recognise the strong personal and collective citizen competences that operate in the city and put them in relation, generating and strengthening democratic and sustainable economic initiatives that provide solutions to the challenges and needs of our lives, our neighbourhoods, our city. Synergies can be very important at a time when multiple processes with a common basis are being set in motion: Experience District, Imagina Madrid...

The key is therefore to join forces in an efficient way and to bring together collaborators from the private and social sectors to accompany the projects in a journey that is far from simple. There are many hands, minds, materials and knowledge necessary for Madrid Escucha to stop being a programme and become an open and inclusive way of making the city among all of us who live there. Let's make it a reality.