Red Cross recognises 18 Camp de Morvedre businesses for supporting employment
The Red Cross brought together companies from Camp de Morvedre at Sagunto's Museo del Pòrtic (Roman archaeological site) on Friday to recognise their role in hiring vulnerable people: its Employment Plan led to 110 job placements last year.
The Red Cross (Cruz Roja) held a meeting this Friday, 18 September, at the Museo del Pòrtic in Sagunto with companies from Camp de Morvedre that help improve access to employment for vulnerable people in the area. The event is part of the «Reto Social Empresarial + PLUS» (Business Social Challenge + PLUS) initiative, which aims to build lasting partnerships between local businesses, public authorities and the Red Cross to bring job opportunities closer to people who need them most.
The meeting took place in a distinctive spot in Sagunto's old town: the Museo del Pòrtic, a Roman archaeological site built into a residential building in the town centre and turned into a small museum open to visitors, where Roman remains — including a colonnaded street, a sewer and funerary monuments — sit alongside Visigothic and Muslim-era remains. Choosing this location to honour local businesses also highlights the heritage value Sagunto places behind its own social initiatives.
The Red Cross's own figures give a sense of how much this work actually reaches. Its Employment Plan supported 312 people in Camp de Morvedre last year, 192 of them women. Of those, 46 took part in professional training with work placements at local companies, and 110 ended up finding a job. The organisation stresses that reaching that number of hires depends heavily on support from both businesses and public authorities: without companies willing to open their hiring processes to these programmes, the share of people finding work would be far lower.
Through «Reto Social Empresarial + PLUS», the Red Cross currently maintains stable partnerships with 18 companies in Camp de Morvedre. Friday's meeting brought together a selection of those companies and public bodies, with HR managers mostly from logistics and services firms, alongside active participation from Sagunto City Council, represented by the Councillor for Economic Development, Raúl Palmero.
As part of the event, the Red Cross this year gave recognition awards to several companies that have most helped provide training, unpaid work placements, or actual job placements for vulnerable people. Those honoured include Ausolan, Aldi Logística, Randstad ETT, Sonepar, AZA, Pulcridad, Mundolimp, Improving, AGC and Open Space — companies spanning sectors as varied as catering, logistics, human resources and manufacturing, which gives an idea of the range of jobs these partnerships can cover.
The «Reto Social Empresarial + PLUS» initiative is co-financed by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), through Spain's National Programme for Social Inclusion, Child Guarantee and the Fight Against Poverty (identification code CCI 2021ES05SFPR003). That EU backing allows the Red Cross to sustain these employment pathways over time — something that would be far harder to maintain consistently using only its own resources.
The Spanish Red Cross's Employment Plan is not a new programme: it launched back in 2000 to help the most vulnerable people access a fundamental right — decent work — regardless of age, origin, gender or educational background. A quarter of a century later, that same programme remains the backbone behind events like Friday's in Sagunto.
In the Valencian Community, the Employment Plan is built around four support strands: Personalised Insertion Pathways, Specific Measures, Inclusive Markets, and Self-Employment Initiatives. These are processes tailored to each person's needs, largely funded through EU instruments such as the European Social Fund, which the Red Cross says have proven especially effective both during economic crises with high unemployment and for people who have been out of work for a long time.
For Camp de Morvedre, a comarca (district) going through major economic change driven by the automotive and energy industries, having stable routes into employment for the most disadvantaged groups matters a great deal: it not only widens the pool of people with a real chance of joining the job market, but also gives local businesses a form of social involvement directly tied to their own community. According to elperiodic.com, with additional information from Wikipedia on the Museo del Pòrtic.