Family Futures

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dvancing

ocial

ntegration

and

ntergenerational

olidarity

care. It also aims to develop a second level of specialized

care in outreach work with families that have the most crit-

ical needs and those suffering socio-familial vulnerability.

This will ensure fast and efficient access to existing basic

social services and promote the intrafamily and relational

changes necessary for families to independently sustain the

improvements achieved.

It is understood that without changes in the material

conditions of life there will be few changes in other aspects

of everyday life, such as family ties, relational structure,

capacity building and learning. Conversely, if there is no

socio-educational process to accompany and sustain the mate-

rial production of these changes and promote understanding

and subjective appropriation, only the immediate survival

needs of families will be addressed, without generating trans-

formations that can be sustained over time.

Cercanías bases its actions on institutional linkages with

other programmes, institutions and existing services in the

territories (utilities, in agreement with the state or provided

by civil society). In particular, it communicates with other

programmes aimed at the population in most critical situa-

tions, such as Uruguay Crece Contigo and Jóvenes en Red.

To guide its actions, Cercanías first seeks to conceptualize

the term family, understanding this as: “A group of indi-

viduals united by affective relationships and/or relationship,

forming a matrix linking around the breadwinner and social,

cultural and/or biological reproduction. Shares a temporal-

spatial dimension of everyday life, with unique identity,

history and future prospects.”

This definition not only represents an important concep-

tual agreement, but also has methodological derivations that

place the family in a larger social totality and in a relation-

ship network that exceeds the support group. It is also well

understood that families and contradictions express them-

selves as manifestations of that totality, in the context of

a system that produces and reproduces unequal relations

based on domination, oppression and expropriation of

socially produced goods.

Within this system and the relations promoted by it, the

rights of a large number of families are violated for various

reasons, creating a situation of inequality in access to the

opportunity structure, material and symbolic goods. Many

of these families fail to conform to the logic and require-

ments imposed by that structure, and most do not even

have the minimum potential in terms of resources, services

or rights exercised.

In order to understand and recognize the diversity of family

arrangements, the demands of production and reproduction

imposed by daily life and the vulnerability to which many

families are exposed, it is necessary to distance conceptual-

izations that do not take into account cultural, historical and

social aspects, and to see those conceptualizations as ‘prob-

lematic’, ‘dysfunctional’ and so on.

“There is in our country a lot of families that are being

violated in their rights, their social and labour living

processes and by educational exclusion and residential

segregation. They have acquired particular characteristics

depending on their unique paths and the resources avail-

able to them. In turn, family functions in general have

changed and existing institutions must achieve appropri-

ate responses to the needs of this population sector.” This

finding requires that the state, as the public actor responsi-

Uruguay has seen a sharp increase in poverty and social fragmentation since the 1990s

Image: Cercanías Coordination Program