America Solidaria, TECHO-Chile, the Community of Solidarity Organizations and the Overcoming Poverty Foundation reflected on ways to overcome the types of poverty and inequities that currently exist in our country.
"How far can we tolerate a development model that has made Chile a country with robust social indicators in its averages, but with huge and unacceptable welfare gaps among its inhabitants?" manifest.
During the commemoration of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the Overcoming Poverty Foundation gave the representatives of 6 presidential candidates (Alejandro Guillier, Alejandro Navarro, Beatriz Sanchez, Carolina Goic, Marco Enríquez-Ominami and Sebastián Piñera) the proposal of social policy "Social Thresholds for Chile", Developed with the collaboration of the Center for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion (COES) and the support of the Colunga Foundation.
This proposal proposes guidelines for action on four axes:
- Centralism: There is an excessive political, fiscal and administrative centralism that causes the lag of development of large areas of the country.
- The violence of segregation: there are practices that segregate people in poverty in certain neighborhoods or territories, schools, health centers, or jobs, and that are generators of violence.
- Participation in overcoming poverty: Today there is an institutional design that excludes the most vulnerable people from the decisions that affect them.
- The stigmatizing effect on the most vulnerable population: There are welfare policies that stigmatize and label people, which generates greater fragmentation in a society that requires greater integration and equity of opportunities and experiences.
"Poverty has a marked relational dimension, that is, it is generated and perpetuated not only because there are unsatisfied basic needs, but also because people are often affected by relationships of exclusion, subordination, assistance and excessive dependence; what restricts their autonomy and control over their own lives, as well as their possibilities for present and future development, at the individual, family and community level, "said Juan Carlos Feres, President of the Overcoming Poverty Foundation.
Check here executive summary of "Social Thresholds for Chile".