Marí Fe Bustamente is a 28-year-old Gitana woman who benefits from the X Solidaria or box 106 of the Income Tax return, through the project ‘Calí, for the equality of Gitana women’ of Fundación Secretariado Gitano.
This program is designed to assist women in situations of special vulnerability and accompany them in their personal, social, and work processes, as indicated by its promoters.
«I feel strong now to access a job. I have lost the fear of managing on my own and I know I can do it,» said Marí Fe, who wanted to share her story: she was born in a town in Cuenca in a Gitana family engaged in street vending, and although she had support to study, she didn’t like it, so at the age of 16, she started helping out at her parents’ stall.
When she got married and arrived in Madrid at the age of 22, she felt «lost and very lonely»: «Moreover, without any training, I couldn’t do anything, and I started looking for a place to guide me.»
That’s how she came across Fundación Secretariado Gitano and its project, where she started participating. «When I arrived at Calí, I met other women going through different moments in their lives. There were young and older women, widows, married and single, without studies, some with very serious problems, but all with the desire to move forward with strength,» she highlights.
«I’ve seen how each one has evolved, and that has also been a great learning experience. Every day I made a two-hour journey to attend the meetings, but I always arrived with enthusiasm. Thanks to that, I educated myself, shared very enriching experiences, discovered aspects of myself that I didn’t know,» she adds.
With projects like this, funded by X Solidaria, Fundación Secretariado Gitano has supported 1,068 women like Marí Fe in training itineraries on socio-personal and employability skills; they have also carried out 448 awareness actions on gender equality and violence prevention with 2,435 women and 1,511 men, and have provided support to 102 women in situations of gender violence.
Regarding gender violence, there are programs funded with the specific Social Fines box to address it, such as the project ‘Approach to gender violence from an intersectional and intercultural perspective’ by Unión de Asociaciones Familiares (UNAF), in which Liliana Puscas, an intercultural mediator in the educational field at CAREI (Aragonese Center for Equity and Innovation Reference), has participated, working with families of students from Eastern Europe.
Liliana is a beneficiary of the project, specifically of the ‘Promoters of Equality’ course within it, and she has wanted to share that it has served her «on a personal level, but especially in her work.»
Thus, she has been able to learn about the legal framework regarding the VIOGEN system and how to apply basic rules such as active listening, confidentiality, empathy, respecting silences, and, in general, the tools used when intervening and supporting a woman survivor of gender violence. «I have only words of gratitude,» Liliana points out.
Both Marí Fe’s and Liliana’s testimonies are examples of how X Solidaria funds social projects to comprehensively address the various difficulties faced by vulnerable women in Spain, highlighting the importance of continuing to check the Social Fines box on the tax return.
FUENTE