Daniel Fernández Gómez, deputy general coordinator of the Spanish Red Cross. “We can all do something in our environment to deal with unwanted loneliness”

• The conference is the third of the Open Source cycle of the 2023/2024 academic year, organized by the Inditex-UDC Sustainability Chair.
• Fernández gave the lecture ‘Unwanted loneliness: social impact and solutions’ at the University of A Coruña.

A Coruña, May 30, 2024.- The social impact on unwanted loneliness was the focus of Daniel Fernández Gómez, Deputy General Coordinator at the Spanish Red Cross, in his report ‘Unwanted loneliness: social impact and solutions’, which corresponds to the third and final session of the Open Code 2023/2024 conference series, organized by the Inditex-UDC Chair of Sustainability. The event took place this Wednesday, May 29, at the Rectory of the University of A Coruña.

The conference was attended by the Rector of the UDC, Ricardo Cao; the president of the UDC Social Council, Antonio Abril Abadín; the director of the Inditex-UDC Chair, Marta Rey García; and the head of Community Investment at Inditex, Carlos Piñeiro.

Ricardo Cao, highlighted the UDC’s commitment to this issue through various initiatives and programs, such as the Senior University, or the work of the UDC’s Cooperation and Volunteering Office through programs such as ‘Acompañarte’, in collaboration with Cáritas Diocesana, to support elderly people living alone in A Coruña; with Asdegal (Solidarity Association of Galicia), also focused on supporting the elderly, or with Acción Familiar Ferrol, with two projects at the Caranza Residence. All of these projects, the rector pointed out, “contribute to the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 3, which seeks to guarantee a healthy life and promote well-being for everyone at all ages.”

Furthermore, during his speech, Cao made a “call for reflection and to take steps to put in place mechanisms that allow us to avoid unwanted loneliness, a growing problem in our society. From the University of A Coruña we will continue working with dedication and effort to combat it and to jointly create a more supportive and inclusive society.”

The president of the UDC Social Council, Antonio Abril Abadín, highlighted the solid commitment of the Inditex-UDC Chair in Sustainability to University-Company collaboration, training and dissemination through the Specialization Course in Sustainability and Social Innovation and its Open Code conference series, which managed to bring together 22 students and more than 500 face-to-face and online attendees to the conferences throughout this past year. He also thanked the Spanish Red Cross for its collaboration in this closing of CESIS through the conference given by Daniel Fernández. “Initiatives like these demonstrate the Chair’s vocation to reach society in general and stimulate constructive and plural debate around highly topical issues,” said Abril Abadín.

For her part, Marta Rey, director of the Inditex-UDC Chair in Sustainability, recalled that since its inception, this university chair has been presented as a tool for investing in the community, promoting service-learning projects that help provide sustainable solutions to complex challenges that require a systemic approach and the generation of solid alliances between multiple actors.

Daniel Fernández began his talk by addressing the problem of unwanted loneliness in Spanish society and current trends in this area. Thus, he explained that “at the Red Cross we know that unwanted loneliness is a loneliness that hurts, which can have important consequences for the people who suffer from it, with impacts on a physical, psychological and social level; and also with impacts on society, because we are seeing that the experience of unwanted loneliness entails enormous social and economic costs that must be taken into account when designing public policies from all areas.”

The deputy general coordinator of the Spanish Red Cross assured that “however, the good news is that unwanted loneliness has a solution and all people can do something in our environment to change this situation. At an individual level, it is increasingly important that we learn to strengthen our connections and social relationships and that we are not afraid to seek help and talk about it, if we feel alone. In addition, we also need society and the environment to be sensitive to this reality and promote the creation of community spaces and networks that generate increasingly inclusive and resilient communities and, for this, the collaboration of all citizens, as well as companies, administrations and the entire social fabric is essential”, highlighted Daniel Fernández.

Furthermore, during his speech, Fernández explained how “at the Spanish Red Cross we have maintained a humanitarian commitment for decades in the fight against unwanted loneliness and we develop responses through volunteer action, which is a fundamental source of support, listening and accompaniment to reduce loneliness and promote links with your community.”

Creation of shared value from the University

Daniel Fernández

With more than thirty years of experience in the Spanish Red Cross, Daniel Fernández has worked in management roles at the Spanish Red Cross Youth (youth section of the Spanish Red Cross) and technical roles in the fields of the environment, volunteering, training and social intervention. In 2019, he embarked on a new role to coordinate a work team in charge of managing the IMAP platform (Integral of the People Care Framework), a technological application that manages all the intervention that the Spanish Red Cross develops with users from the different projects and services, as well as the Organization’s volunteers. The IMAP project has been running since 2020 and all those technologies whose objective is to care for vulnerable groups continue to be integrated into it.

Fernández studied Biological Sciences at the University of Santiago de Compostela, but his more than ten years of volunteering led him to direct his professional career towards social work. Since October 2023, he has been the vice-general coordinator of the Spanish Red Cross.

In Open Code, an initiative of the Inditex-UDC Sustainability Chair

The Open Source Conference Series is promoted by the Inditex-UDC Chair of Sustainability. The relationship between the University of A Coruña and Inditex led to the creation of the chair more than a decade ago, as a result of the collaboration agreement signed by both entities to promote university social responsibility in 2010. The coordination of this initiative is in charge of the UDC Social Council, as the body for society’s participation in the university.

This university-business chair, a pioneer among Spanish universities, was the first step towards the creation of a much broader collaboration program between Inditex and the UDC, which today includes the InTalent Program, for the international recruitment of excellent researchers, created in 2016, and the Inditex-UDC Predoctoral Fellowship Program, created in 2013.