During the Creative Bureaucracy Festival held in Germany, Bogotá was honored with the Large Scale Impact Award for the design and implementation of their Care System and the establishment of the Care Blocks. This prestigious accolade is granted to cities and initiatives that excel worldwide in placing innovation at the core of their public policies.
The award ceremony took place at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, one of the foremost events in public and social innovation held annually in Berlin, Germany.
The festival brings together over 1,000 international leaders representing public administration, politics, civil society, and other transformative organizations to exchange ideas and showcase examples of innovation in various territories.
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This year's festival theme focused on "impact, trust, future, networks, unlearning, action, justice, and imagination" within bureaucracy. During the awards ceremony, Charles Landry and the Creative Bureaucracy Festival team identified leaders and initiatives that have made a substantial impact, contributed to enhancing the lives of citizens, and strive to bring about positive change in the public sector.
Bogotá's achievement reflects the dedication of the City Administration, led by Mayor Claudia López Hernández, in creating and implementing the Care System, the first of its kind in a Latin American city. The Care Blocks, a vital component of this system, demonstrate Bogotá's leadership in public innovation on a global scale.
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The Large Scale Impact Award recognizes the incorporation of innovative ideas in the development of public policies that contribute to the progress of territories.
About Bogotá's Care System
In the case of Bogotá, the District Care System is the greatest social innovation of recent times, a program created to recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work.
With the establishment of the Care System, Bogotá not only took a historic step in recognizing the contribution of care work and those who perform it, primarily women, to the sustenance of society but also created a territorial model to help caregivers overcome the time poverty generated by caregiving overload and have free, accessible, nearby, and simultaneous services for themselves and their families: the Care Blocks.
They are a model of territorial organization that integrates care, tactical urbanism, and a gender perspective. The Care Blocks are areas of the city where we concentrate infrastructure and services to provide care in a close and simultaneous manner to caregivers and their families.
For example, within a Care Block, caregivers and those they care for can find schools, daycares, parks, hospitals, and centers for the elderly and people with disabilities, all within a 30-minute walking distance. This way, we ensure that they don't have to invest time and money in transportation and can enjoy all the services they need to improve their quality of life.
In the Care Blocks, women can study, start businesses, find employment, rest, exercise, receive legal and psychological guidance, and wash their own and their family's clothes in community laundries, all completely free. While they utilize these services, the people they care for are attended to in spaces where their abilities are developed, and their autonomy is promoted.
In this way, Bogotá relieves women of the burden of caregiving, providing them with time and services to pursue their dreams while caring for those in need.
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This recognition also highlights the inclusion of the iBo Public Innovation Lab in the Care Blocks. With its participation, the Care System was strengthened to generate new digital solutions for caregivers. Through a digital tool, caregivers can autonomously register their information, access data about their attendance and progress in care services, and personalize an identification card that recognizes them as part of the system.
Additionally, iBo's involvement in the Care System led to the creation of a chatbot for service providers. By capturing a photo of various identification cards, the chatbot digitizes, streamlines, and reduces the time it takes to register caregivers' attendance at the Care Blocks' services. Currently, this process has been implemented in the Care Blocks of Puente Aranda and Teusaquillo in a testing phase that has benefited more than 700 women.
This latest project is being managed with resources from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which, in 2021, decided to believe in a multidisciplinary innovation team with the purpose of strengthening public innovation, a fundamental pillar for digital transformation and the consolidation of the city as a smart territory.
Bogotá continues to position itself as a reference for public innovation. With the Care System, it has already opened 19 Care Blocks, launched 2 Care Buses, and provided over 400,000 services to caregivers and their families. Meanwhile, we continue to care for those they care for in spaces like the NIDOS- Early Childhood Art program (Arte en primera infancia) by IDARTES, which aims to contribute to the comprehensive development of children aged 0 to 5 through artistic and creative experiences.
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