All doors of the apartments in La Llavor facility for #homeless women have images of strong, inspirational women on them. The women, transgender and non-binary people that live in the facility choose the image when they arrive. Our guide Martha* (not her real name), who has lived in the facility for half a year, chose French writer and feminist Olympe de Gouges, only because she liked the hat that Olympe is wearing in the picture.
This is just one of the intriguing things that we learned during our ISHF – International Social Housing Festival 2023 site visit to La Lavor homeless facility up in the hills, overlooking #Barcelona. Martha has no permit to be in Spain. After arriving she became homeless, lived in a mixed facility elsewhere in the city, and finally moved to La Llavor. Now she lives among about 40 other women in the facility.
La Llavor is the only 100% female facility in Barcelona. The social workers help women to recover from the specific violence that women experience while being homeless. Step by step the women learn to live a ‘normal’ life of cooking, doing laundry, gardening, and being part of the local community. First, they live in groups and share a toilet and bathroom. Later they live more independently and leave the facility for work in the city.
Apart from the great place – the quiet atmosphere of the building, surrounded by a vegetable garden, distant from the busy city center – we enjoyed the firmness of the social workers, the structured daily routine, and the friendly approach. It felt like women were truly seen as real persons again and that they were building a new future together.
(this article is part of a series of blog articles for the ISHF live blog website, in collaboration with Housing Europe)
#homelessness #socialhousing #affordablehousing #ishf23 #volkshuisvesting
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