Solidarity initiatives
The COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. First wave: from the first cases to the end of June 2020
Monographs from the National Atlas of Spain.
Thematic structure > Social, economic and environmental effects > Solidarity initiatives
Earlier chapters in this publication looked at some of the social and economic impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. These impacts forced many citizens in spring 2020 to turn to the government for support. Public Administrations responded by putting numerous measures in place similarly to the rest of European welfare states. These measures were sometimes an extension of the work that was already being carried out by the national, regional and local administrations. On other occasions, they were new initiatives. The actions taken by the public sector are covered in other chapters of this publication.
To supplement the measures officially deployed by the public administrations, numerous solidarity initiatives were launched in various domains, mobilising a wide range of disparate agents. The initiatives covered in this chapter are a small sample of the extensive social effort to lessen the effects of the first wave of the pandemic on the most vulnerable layers of society during spring 2020. Broadly speaking, these solidarity initiatives may be divided into two categories: those launched by charitable organisations, and those spontaneous initiatives launched by specific individuals and groups. The following paragraphs focus on the work carried out by three non-governmental institutions with a well-known tradition in welfare, i.e. the Spanish Red Cross, Cáritas and the Spanish Federation of Food Banks.
The Spanish Red Cross stepped up the efforts to protect vulnerable people with an action plan called “The Red Cross RESPONDS”. This organisation continued to help those who were already being assisted and, in addition, acted as an auxiliary support agent for the public administrations. An analysis of beneficiaries by age shows that help was most commonly provided to people from 30 to 49 years of age and to those over 70, whilst the breakdown by sex reveals that 64% of those assisted were women. As the graph on the People assisted by the Spanish Red Cross during the first wave of the pandemic depicts, this organisation carried out over 820,000 ‘health’-focused awareness-raising activities to promote measures to prevent and contain the effects of the pandemic. In addition, 110 temporary shelters for over 5,300 homeless people and 30 hospital infrastructures were set up as part of the ‘relief’ actions. Nearly 850,000 food deliveries were made and 600,000 people were assisted under the heading of ‘social inclusion’ actions. Over 50,000 educational support activities were carried out under the heading of ‘education’ actions. Some 50,000 people in fuel poverty were assisted under the heading of ‘environment’ actions. And 62,000 people were assisted under ‘employment’ actions. This organisation was also involved in conveying many patients to hospitals. The Spanish Red Cross mobilised 50,000 volunteers to deploy these actions, of which 58% were women and 47% were between 20 and 39 years of age. In short, the Spanish Red Cross assisted over 3.5 million people and issued over 9 million responses through the website.
Cáritas recorded a 59% increase in the amount of people assisted and a 77% increase in requests for support. Given the circumstances, the vast majority of those requests came through electronic channels; online consultations leapt from 17% to 78% of the requests to this organisation. Most came from people under fragile labour conditions (food and beverage sector, domestic workers, etc.), from unemployed, from those on furloughs, from ‘black economy’ workers and from single-parent families predominantly women. One in three applicants had not requested help for over a year, and for 26% of them it was the first time they approached Cáritas for support.
The Spanish Federation of Food Banks experienced a period of intense activity during the second quarter of 2020, with the number of operations far exceeding previously recorded figures. Over 32.1 million kilograms/litres of food were dispensed from April to June 2020, 30% more than in the same quarter of the previous year.
Co-authorship of the text in Spanish: Rafael Córdoba Hernández, Joan Font Fábregas, José Manuel Gómez Giménez, Isabel González García and José Sancho Comíns. See the list of members engaged
The pandemic and solidarity on Twitter
Social networks serve as a novel source for tracking social behaviour. They have also become a very useful tool for getting quickly in contact during crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The information published on social networks has a huge potential in various fields, and more specifically for public health studies. Members of the Geographic Information Technologies and Territorial Analysis research group at the University of Alcalá downloaded data from Twitter and processed them to draw the graphs included in this topic.
Firstly, the group extracted all the messages with the hashtags included in the attached list, published from 1 February to 30 June 2020. Of these, any posts written by an author whose place of residence was identified as Spain in the Twitter registry were selected. Next, hashtags posted from 3 February to 28 June 2020 were grouped into weeks, completing 28 weeks between the two mentioned dates. After this initial filtering process, the database contained nearly 5 million tweets, 28% of those initially downloaded. The data were then grouped into provinces, further reducing them to 68% of those originally selected.
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HASHTAGS INCLUDED IN THE RESEARCH #apoyomutuo #bancodealimentos #solidaridadcovid19 #yomequedoencasa #solivid #ekimenakcovid19 #frenalacorba #frenalacurva #caritas #iniciativascovid19 #joemquedoacasa #solidaridadecovid19 #ralentizaracurva #quedonacasa #cruzrojaresponde #solidaritatcovid19 #iniciativescovid19 #solidaridad #elkartasunacovid19 #kurbamoteldu #nietxeangeratukonaiz
Finally, three weeks were chosen to show the evolution in Tweets. The week with the largest flow of communications was 23-29 March 2020. The week before and the week after were also represented, yet a sharp decline in the amount of publications was registered. The graphs show therefore both the inception of these Tweets and their decline. The last map renders the full 28 weeks under assessment.
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Map: Tweets including solidarity hashtags during the pandemic. Lockdown – week 1. 2020. Spain. PDF. Data. Interactive version. -
Map: Tweets including solidarity hashtags during the pandemic. Lockdown – week 2. 2020. Spain. PDF. Data. Interactive version. -
Map: Tweets including solidarity hashtags during the pandemic. Lockdown – week 3. 2020. Spain. PDF. Data. Interactive version. -
Map: Tweets including solidarity hashtags during the first wave of the pandemic. 2020. Spain. PDF. Data. Interactive version.
Co-authorship of the text in Spanish: Juan Luis Bermúdez González, Francisco Escobar Martínez and Nieves López Estébanez. See the list of members engaged
Citizen solidarity initiatives
The action of the public administrations and third-sector institutions played an essential role in lessening the impact of the pandemic on health and social issues, as detailed in the previous paragraphs. Furthermore, these initiatives were complemented by spontaneous citizen solidarity initiatives.
Several mutual support mechanisms emerged from March to June 2020. For instance, there were offers to do the shopping for neighbours; actions to assist the elderly or people with functional diversity; psychological support activities; projects to produce masks and other medical supplies; help with childcare; a wide variety of cultural initiatives; etc. This phenomenon was characterised by the speed with which initiatives emerged, their rapid widespread through social networks, the thematic cross-cutting nature of their activities and their extensive geographical implementation.
Outbreaks of solidarity initiatives have been seen before in Spain as well as in other countries, particularly during the 2008-2013 financial crisis, and many of those that emerged during the COVID-19 crisis were ephemeral. Nonetheless, their roll-out helped lessen the effects of the crisis on peoples’ living conditions, even in countries with a well-developed welfare state, like Spain. The experience showed that the persistence of these initiatives and their potential to transform societies depend on their ability to combine the provision of effective social support with the organisation of citizens to claim their rights as well as with the promotion of alternative ways of producing goods and services.
The emergence of citizen solidarity initiatives during the first months of the pandemic gave rise to various internet applications aimed at advertising their existence and raising awareness amongst potential users. One of these was the SOLIVID network, which aimed at spreading the word about solidarity initiatives as well as gathering information for research. The network was launched at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in April 2020, is currently made up of 34 research groups from 12 countries and has registered 3,000 solidarity initiatives in 28 countries (primarily in Europe and Latin America) through collaborative mapping. SOLIVID had identified and located 878 solidarity initiatives in Spain towards the end of June 2020. Even though these initiatives do not thoroughly list the full range of citizen solidarity initiatives that arose during the first wave of the pandemic, they do provide a significant sample for assessing the importance of this experience.
The varied spheres of action confirm the transversality of the solidarity initiatives and their actions (see the graph on Solidarity initiatives during the pandemic according to sphere of action). About two-thirds of the initiatives may be grouped under the common heading ‘support for vulnerable groups’. These initiatives were also very much autonomous as only 17% claim to have worked jointly with or received support from public administrations or other institutions, whilst this public funding applied to 24% of cases in Argentina, 38% in Italy and 45% in Colombia.
Data also highlight the limitations of citizen action in the face of the crisis, with one of the most relevant drawbacks being its unequal geographical deployment. The maps for five big Spanish cities, i.e. Madrid, Barcelona, València, Seville (Sevilla) and Bilbao, based on a sample of 271 initiatives, show quite consistently that the initiatives emerged powerfully in medium to medium-high income neighbourhoods, more than in vulnerable or very well-off ones. According to data from the National Statistics Institute, 43% of the initiatives registered in these cities were in neighbourhoods with average incomes in the sixth, seventh and eighth decile in the distribution of household income. Thus, the widespread of solidarity initiatives through the Internet was related to the need for them as well as with the human resources available and with the ability to organise these initiatives in a given area.
Co-authorship of the text in Spanish: Joan Checa Rius and Oriol Nel·lo Colom. See the list of members engaged
- BLANCO, I. y NEL·LO, O. (2021): «Pandemic, cities, and mutual support: the role of urban social innovation in the COVID-19 crisis», COVID briefs. CIDOB. Available in: https://dossiers.cidob.org/cities-in-times-of-pandemics/assets/pdf/ISMAEL%20BLANCO_SOCIAL%20INNOVATION.PDF
- SENNETT, R. (2020): «Can Covid-19 change the Welfare State? Without government support, communities take charge of their own care». En Foreign Affairs. Available in: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2020-10-30/can-covid-19-change-welfare-state
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