Attention to disability: Residential health-care and Active Ageing

Fundación Personas began its activity in 2008 and it is the result of the joint venture of six private associations that have been working for people with intellectual disabilities for over 50 years. This is a private non-profit organization that employs over 1,450 people, half of them with disabilities, and provides with services to nearly 2600 people in sixty centers within 30 different locations.

Our main objective is to promote prevention, health-care, educational assistance and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. For this purpose, we offer the services and care required by our users at all times, thus helping to improve their own life quality and also their family around.

Fundación Personas has two main working areas within the field of intellectual disability: The care and educational assistance area and the employment one.

When talking about care and educational assistance area we focus on "early intervention" (aimed at children aged 0 to 3 years old), "educational services" (aimed at students aged 3 to 21 years old), "day service" (aimed at people over 16 who need general support), "occupational service" (aimed at facilitating access to the labor market for people with intellectual disabilities), "residential and housing service"(favoring the autonomy and independent functioning at home and in the community), "sport and leisure services" and "support services to families".

In the employment area we work on handled  and industry services (manipulated, packaging of industrial products, cosmetics, toiletries and beauty products, honeycomb cardboard, electrical equipment, food packaging, and recycling of used vegetable oil), cleaning (maintenance of workplaces and homes, specific treatment of certain places and 24 hours emergency services ), parks and gardens (design and installation of green spaces, gardening, maintenance of green areas, garden shop-center), catering (cafeteria, restaurant, self-service, catering and home delivery), outsourcing (file management, concierge, industrial paint, facilities maintenance, transport), direct marketing (graphic arts, file custody, encrypted destruction, warehouse and logistics).

We aim to participate in projects related to "Health and Active Ageing" in order to help developing new ICT systems and techniques for our target "end-users" (mainly people with intellectual disabilities) to improve their life quality and well-being.

We have already participated in Erasmus projects in the past and now we are fostering to open wide our experience and expertise by roling in other European Projects such as AAL Programme.

We offer ourselves as a partner for creating a consortium where we could help by testing and validating the technology and/or solutions that any Research Centre, enterprise, University or whatsoever entity may research and develop. We can test all devices within the "end-users" of our care residential and educational services.

We don´t intend to lead nor coordinate projects but participate as the end-user partner that every single research work need in order to test, pilot and validate its results.