Loulé City Council presented the Loulé Municipal Plan for Equality and Non-Discrimination 2023-26 last Thursday, the 16th, at Cineteatro Louletano, in a public session where some of the results of the actions carried out so far were also announced. , within the scope of the plan.
"Eliminating gender stereotypes, providing equal opportunities and recognition to all citizens, ensuring collective participation in society and promoting people's quality of life and well-being, whether in the personal or professional sphere, are the main guidelines of this initiative», explained the Loulé Chamber.
This is «a project aimed not only “inwards”, that is, towards the more than 2 thousand municipal employees, but also “outwards”, as this is a Plan aimed at the citizens of the municipality of Loulé» .
In the internal dimension, «the proposed measures have an impact on governance, people management, communication, training and careers, evaluation, among others, always integrating a gender perspective in the organization's practices».
«In the external dimension, the measures refer to intervention at territorial level, in the different areas of activity of the Municipality, such as social policies, prevention and combat against various forms of violence, education and youth, disability, mobility and security, citizenship and participation, job market, among others», described the municipality.
In Thursday's session, the councilor responsible for Equality, Marilyn Zacarias, thanked the dedication of «everyone who takes this project forward», a team made up of 11 members.
With a 4-year horizon, this is the first Plan drawn up for the Municipality of Loulé and it includes actions in the areas of communication, education and training, conciliation, gender equality, social cohesion, public and social space and health.
In terms of communication, in addition to awareness-raising and training actions among municipal employees, in schools, IPSS, among other places, «the municipality is investing in the implementation of an inclusive language, promoting equality in the treatment of both the sexes, to communicate internally and externally».
Also, the 2024 municipal budget will be a “gender-sensitive budget”.
The area of reconciling professional, personal and family life is not forgotten, with one of the planned initiatives being “the launch of a competition to reward companies and business associations that implement these good practices”.
In terms of education and training, «it is mainly within the school community that the measures are being implemented and aim to promote school education free from gender stereotypes, in a continuous process over time and not just carried out in two or three sessions» , added the Loulé Chamber.
And as «equality is also achieved in the public space», one of the municipality's objectives «is to make a diagnosis and create the conditions to allow accessibility to all people».
In the field of social cohesion, one of the actions contemplated is the integration into regulations of municipal support and program contracts of conditions that promote equality and non-discrimination.
In the social and health areas, carrying out awareness-raising actions on domestic violence or those aimed at the topic of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and sexual characteristics are part of the Plan.
"On the other hand, the aim is to promote the empowerment of women and men in situations of particular social and economic vulnerability, namely elderly people, people with disabilities, migrants or ethnic minorities", assured the municipality.
In terms of gender equality, the municipal team “has been promoting forums in schools in the municipality, with the aim of raising awareness among young people about this topic. The celebration of anniversaries linked to the theme (International Women's Day, International Men's Day, Municipal Equality Day or International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), or as mayor Vítor Aleixo announced during this session, the interest in integrating Loulé in the Arco-Íris Municipalities Network they are also initiatives that promote equality».
In the session, Ana Paixão, trainer and technician at CIG, the entity promoting the Network of Local Authorities for Equality, who has been following and collaborating with the Loulé team, spoke about the integration of Loulé into this network, «constituted with the premise of bringing together municipalities from all over the country, with various geographic, demographic and economic realities, to discuss among themselves strategies to promote gender equality in local action».
For Ana Paixão, Loulé is a municipality that «has been inspiring with its practices», as it manages to «show that it is possible to implement measures outside the box that reach people and that concern people. But they also have the capacity for innovation and transformation, to mainstream equality in various areas and not be afraid to work on inclusion in all dimensions».
During this session, the role of equality in the artistic world was also discussed, in a reflection in which the actress and director Marlene Barreto, and the director and artistic director, Ricardo Neves-Neves, in a panel moderated by Marinela Malveiro, spoke about the arts panorama and the inequalities between women and men that persist in all artistic disciplines.
«Of the 119 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, only 17 were women, but this is just one among many other data that point in the same direction: in the artistic world things are not very different from what happens in other areas of society », stated the Chamber.
At the end of the session, Sandra Ribeiro, president of the Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality, the entity responsible for implementing public policies relating to these matters, highlighted that this is “a very adult and thoughtful plan that touches all areas, with perfect notion of the logic of intersectionality, which follows much of what the national strategy and its action plans are».
Vítor Aleixo, president of the Chamber of Loulé, considered equality matters as “civilizational objectives. We are dealing with a set of values that human civilization has arrived at that we need to protect, conceptualize, place in the context of the current world and project its future».
According to the mayor, the policy for equality is one of the “structuring axes” of the municipality’s action, along with “active and healthy aging, climate action and sustainable development, education or the rehabilitation of its heritage and the memory of human communities” .
«We are on the right path, this is a plan to defend human rights», he concludes.
Comments