Sique, two decades responding to the residential needs of people with disabilities

The Sique foundation continues to grow. The entity started its activity nearly two decades ago, focused on responding to the needs of people with intellectual disabilities or mental health problems in the housing and leisure spheres, and since then has been adding lines of activity and residential resources.

With the support of the Institut Català de Finances (ICF), the foundation has purchased and renovated two homes in Badalona to allocate them to social housing and provide a home for six people with intellectual disabilities. This initiative, framed within the Support for Autonomy in One's Own Home program, has been made possible with 168,000 euros in financing from the public development bank of the Generalitat de Catalunya through an ICF Social Economy loan.

The ICF directs these loans to social enterprises and entities, which often have difficulty obtaining financing for their investments. Through a limited guarantee from the European Investment Fund (EIF) and with the support of the European InvestEU program, the ICF makes more financing available to the Catalan social sector.

With this support from the ICF, Sique expects the apartments to be ready in October. The entity was promoted in Badalona precisely by relatives of people with disabilities, who form its board of trustees along with other professionals. Although it was born in Badalona, it has users from all over the Barcelona area, currently amounting to between 150 and 170 people.

Although it has been expanding its lines of activity, the foundation was born focused on the housing sector, as other entities in Badalona already offered occupational and day center services. "Our initial intention was to solve the housing issue, and we started by creating our home-residence," an old disused hotel that they renovated with the support of the ICF, as explained by the foundation's manager, Samuel Esturo.

Then they added services, also focused on people with disabilities with more autonomy who lived on their own, to whom the foundation offers supportive home visits. In parallel, and with more users, the entity creates cohabitation units in apartments it makes available to them.

These cohabitation units, with a maximum of three people, receive tailored support and supervision from the entity, "depending on what they need, whether it's in the area of health, shopping, or household chores," Esturo details. In this residential modality, the foundation has 50 users, who join another 12 from its home-residence.

Sique created a decade ago a travel agency specialized in people with disabilities

Also in the field of leisure, Sique organizes activity groups and excursions for weekends, which currently include more than 90 people. In addition, it has a basketball and a football club that compete with other clubs and, although the user profile of the entity is fundamentally adult, it promotes children's camps for special education schools.

The foundation, which also offers psychological services, has been diversifying its activity, even organizing an annual charity market in May, in which more than 300 companies collaborate with their products, ranging from clothing to wine, and which raises about 40,000 euros in each edition.

But that's not all: to obtain more resources for its activity, Sique even created a travel agency specialized in people with disabilities. Launched ten years ago, it now works with about 50 entities aimed at the collective, and some 3,000 people pass through it each year. The agency generates a third of the foundation's annual income, about 300,000 euros, which are added to funds from the Generalitat to put them at the service of people with intellectual disabilities and their families.