The Spanish Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities (CERMI) awarded last February 8th in Madrid the prize cermi.es 2022 in the category of Best Practice of Associative Collaboration to ‘Proyecto Rumbo’ promoted by COCEMFE (with whom ViveLibre collaborates) and with the participation of Confederación ASPACE, PREDIF, FEDACE, and Autismo España.

With this award, CERMI publicly recognizes this collaborative initiative between different third-sector organizations. These institutions want to implement a new model of support for personal autonomy and care for people with disabilities, especially those with increased support needs. To this end, they want to promote the combination of services and resources, fostering independent living and facilitating inclusive ways of life in conditions of safety, accessibility, and well-being.

The Rumbo Project, which started last year and will finish by the end of 2024, follows a logic of innovation that aims not only to experiment with innovative solutions to complex common problems but also to generate a shared learning process, demonstrating how new policies work in practice.

It is necessary to test and experiment within a framework of innovation, multiplying the possibilities for learning and developing solutions to transform the direction of public policies about support for people and the modernization of social services.

The award, according to the decision of the jury of the cermi.es 2022 awards, is granted to ‘Proyecto Rumbo’ for the collaborative work of these five entities to seek to promote the transition towards models that guarantee the right to independent living and social participation of all people with disabilities among different organizations of the Third Sector.

The president of CERMI State, Luis Cayo Pérez Bueno, presented the statuette and the diploma of the cermi.es 2022 award to the president of COCEMFE, Anxo Queiruga, as the leading entity of the project.

During the ceremony, the president of CERMI stated that CERMI awarded Rumbo for embodying what the associative cooperation of organized disability should be. Namely, to leave the limits of what is exclusively its own, of the identity that keeps to itself to meet with other structured expressions of disability to conceive and deploy shared initiatives that are more effective in precipitating the social change that people with disabilities need. That is Rumbo, in the domain of deinstitutionalization, a cornerstone horizon in the political agenda of our social movement”. That is Rumbo, in the field of deinstitutionalization, a cornerstone horizon in the political agenda of our social movement”.

At the event, representatives of the five entities that compound the ‘Rumbo Project’ took the floor. Manuela Muro, president of Confederación ASPACE, stated that “thanks to this project, the ASPACE Movement is working on the development of a model of independent living for people with high support needs” and added that it is “a first step towards a paradigm shift. A change that is already underway and that places us in the front line to promote the rights of people with cerebral palsy within the framework of the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”.

On her part, Mercedes Fernández Angulo, secretary of Autism Spain, has expressed that “this award reinforces collaboration, learning, and the way we share knowledge between organizations. A way to join efforts, and to advance together in the rights for all people with disabilities, and therefore, a new way of working for people in the autism spectrum and their families”. Besides, she has underlined that “Rumbo is going to provide us with new models of independent life for people with autism, models that will mark a road map in the bet for the personal choice of each person in the spectrum for their adult life project and their participation in society.”

In the same way, Ana Cabellos Cano, president of FEDACE, has underlined that “projects like Rumbo show that the collaboration of social entities not only adds up but also multiplies the work of each one of the parts and allows us to go further.”

Francisco Sardón, president of PREDIF, stressed that “the RUMBO award is a recognition of the work of social entities in favor of the full inclusion of people with disabilities through the recognition of the uniqueness and life projects of each one. Within this framework, from PREDIF, we work to make personal assistance the core support for people with disabilities to develop and decide autonomously”, he explained.

Finally, the president of COCEMFE thanked CERMI for this recognition, defending that with the PROYECTO RUMBO, the aim is to “contribute to the necessary transformation of the organizational models of social services and care for people, always bearing in mind the human rights approach and complying with international mandates. We hope to promote in a coordinated manner the transition towards models that guarantee the right to independent living and social participation of all people with disabilities, paying special attention to territorial cohesion, the balance between rural and urban areas, and gender equality,” he concluded.

ATAM congratulates the initiative of Proyecto Rumbo.