A beacon of light for city dwellers (1)

Skimming through articles appearing in the media I come across various stories about Valletta. Some of them highlight the revival of the city; its shopping areas, its gardens and can I not mention the mass activities held on a regular basis (such as the Notte Bianca, Notte Magica, the Chinese Festival, carnival, Good Friday processions, etc). Others prefer to focus on the doom and gloom of the city, highlighting the social problems that haunt city dwellers. While both of these realities co-exist in Valletta, sometimes we fall in the trap of focusing on one reality and neglecting the other.

This is not the case with the Valletta local council. This is a council that has its foot firmly on both realities.

In fact, it is always in the forefront when it comes to livening up Valletta, especially after hours. But speaking about the glorious and imposing activities of the city is pretty easy. Instead, I would like to focus on the doom and gloom of the city. In particular, I would like to show how this council, with very limited resources yet facing overwhelming demands, is tackling this problem.

Back in 2005, when we were elected, our council, together with that of Floriana, was approached by Appogg and we started floating ideas as to how we can work together on the social dimension. The discussions took around a year and, in the process, the Floriana local council decided to pull out due to lack of funds. We too had severe funding problems but I'm pleased to say that since the project focused directly on the well-being of our residents (especially those in need) the project was unanimously approved by the council. Some months later, a community worker was engaged to run the project.

Community work must not be confused with social work. It is the process of facilitating change with the help of an external agency. In fact, the positive changes in the living conditions of the people should come about through their own involvement. The role of the community worker is to come up with services based upon the needs of the people, empower people so that they can bring about their own change, help people assume ownership of their community and make people aware of their rights.

At the time, we had no idea where the project would lead us. We only had vague ideas and a bagful of dreams. When we were discussing this project in more details, we decided to focus on three pillars: children and youth; the elderly and adults with social problems.

The first pillar, children and youth (25 per cent of our residents are under 25 years of age), represents the basis of our future society. It is a very vulnerable group, sensitive to the particular conditions that exist in the city but which we believe has a lot of potential.

By choosing this as our first priority, we are paving the way for the citizens of the future. Thus, we don't expect to ripe the benefits immediately because we are planning long term. However, we expect to see gradual improvement over the coming years.

Since Valletta is considered as having an aging population (45 per cent of residents are over 50 years of age), we decided to choose the elderly as our second pillar. These people donated a large chunk of their lives to the city, they kneaded its unique characteristics and, as such, we must show them our gratitude by offering them a peaceful environment where they can live happily. The third pillar deals with the immediate problems we have. It is a known fact that certain areas of Valletta are a nest for social problems. The unfortunate bit is that most of these people are more than willing to break free and overcome these challenges but they need help from others.

To tackle these issues, six months ago we had set up a Valletta Community Network (VCN). Even though we were funding this group, we wanted it to be autonomous from the council, thus, instead of heading it ourselves, we decided that the community worker we had engaged should take the lead. Our role is pretty much marginal, basically to ensure that the money we invest is well spent for the good of our residents and to push when things get stuck.

The network is made up of the three parishes together with a number of other organisations (such as schools, non-governmental organisations, government departments, etc) working in Valletta. Participation in this network is voluntary and, through it, we hope to foster and nurture a good relationship between the various organisations while promoting collaboration. The idea behind it is pretty simple: we want to share the resources of the various organisations, thus overcoming the limitations that an organisation might have in order to achieve greater results.

Although we did our best to approach each and every organisation on an individual basis, there might be some whom we didn't manage to speak to. If this is the case, please do not hesitate to contact me at alexeid@maltanet.net or on 7942 4536. Our door is always open.

If you were to ask me where this network will be in 10 years time, my honest answer would be that I have no idea. But what I can tell you is that we have a vision and we're determined to achieve it. In a nutshell, our vision is simply to have a city better than we have today. And by city we don't mean the monuments and the buildings but we mean the living stones, each and every resident.

The second part of the article (tomorrow) will deal with how the vision is being attained.

Dr Dingli is a Valletta local councillor representing the Nationalist Party. His remit includes youth, employment and social problems.