The Department of Social Welfare of the Arrecife City Council, coordinated by Maite Corujo, presented this Tuesday the awareness day The Garden of Voices, an initiative that tries to raise awareness among the entire population of the diversity of the municipality.
These conferences will take place next Friday at the Arrecife Civic Center.
The objective of the program designed by the Immigration Area for this day, to which the City Council invites citizens to participate, is to promote empathy and a positive intercultural coexistence relationship based on mutual dialogue and the cultural enrichment of Arrecife, prioritizing respect for human rights.
"The wide human and cultural diversity that we have in our municipality requires active management. That is why we are working to offer the necessary mechanisms and spaces to maintain an open, transparent and continuous dialogue with the associative movement and civil society, in order to create stable support networks and program based on the needs of the population," said the Councilor for Social Welfare, Maite Corujo.
According to 2023 data from the City Council's Statistics Department, Arrecife currently has a resident population of 68,950 inhabitants. Of this population that the municipality supports, more than 20% are of foreign nationality and more than 90 different nationalities converge in the city. Added to this data is the fact that it is the municipality with the smallest extension and that it is the capital of the island, that is, where the greatest administrative, leisure and, above all, commercial activity is concentrated.
Led by experts in the field, the Interculturality and Development Conference The Garden of Voices will begin on January 26 at 10:00 a.m. with the official opening, which will be given by the Deputy Mayor, Echedey Eugenio, and the Councilor for Social Welfare, Maite Corujo, and will culminate at 7:00 p.m. with the concert by Vicky & The Jammers band.
Within the planned program, there will be a public dialogue space in which José Manuel Álamo Candelaria (Degree in Social Work and Political Science and Sociology. Member of the scientific management team of the Intercultural Community Intervention Project), will talk about the value of migrants and their contribution to the territories of origin.
A manifesto will also be read by Elizabeth Marjorie Hernanz Lindo (MAFROCAN Association) and Carlos Giménez Romero (Professor of Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Director of the University Institute of Human Rights, Democracy and Culture of Peace and Non-Violence DEMOS-PAZ – UAM and Founder and Director of IMEDES) will offer the presentation "Building territories for intercultural coexistence".
The cultural closing will be in charge of Kamel Nasser from the United Actions Association and the narrator Vicki Dos Santos will be in charge of telling and singing "Stories to love each other better".
Finally, the documentary Partial Story of an Island, by the Tenerife filmmaker Dailo Barco Machado, will be screened.
