As Deputy Director of social services responsible for Social Inclusion and Cooperation with Municipalities in the Autonomous Region of Galicia, Daniel López Muñoz and his team are entrusted with planning, regulating, financing and evaluating local social services. Their work is to manage over 500 different social service programmes, benefits and social pensions for 55,000 users, provided by local authorities and non-governmental organisations.

In practice, this means setting general criteria whilst allowing enough flexibility to help people in exceptional situations. “The key factor is to keep alive an excellent team of thirty well-motivated civil servants in my office. I pay very much attention to the feedback I receive from them,” López Muñoz says, adding that the atmosphere at work is a key factor in maintaining motivation, high performance and generating good results.

The Xunta de Galicia, a member of ESN, is the governing body of the Autonomous Community of Galicia which has its own competences with respect to the provision of social services. Welfare, thus, is entrusted to the General Secretariat for Family and Welfare at the regional level which then divides into sub-departments for: dependency; disabled and elderly; family and children; community services and social inclusion – this last one led by López Muñoz and his team.

In the course of recession, just like many regional authorities in Europe, the Xunta de Galicia is very busy trying to do more with less. It is confronted with a delicate mission to implement the Spanish State Dependency Act which gives users rights to residential care, day centres, home care, benefits, etc. Because the Dependency Act has widespread media coverage across the whole of Spain, the Galician government is pressured to protect these services from cuts. “However, all expansion is linked to the implementation of dependency rights whereas the risk is that other pillars of the social services, such as social inclusion, may suffer in consequence,” López Muñoz explains.

Dedication to improving services for people is nothing new for López Muñoz. His working background as a professional and volunteer social worker (educator) and sociologist in different projects dealing with local research on elderly, education of children in public care, community development in rural areas, educating trainers, etc. Following this experience, Muñoz took up a role as a civil servant in the welfare department and, later on, worked on social development with fishing communities in Galicia. This was the gateway for López Muñoz to take up a role of coordinating a project in Namibia, where he worked for four years. “It was a fabulous experience working together with Galician and Icelandic colleagues in order to set up a training institution on fisheries in Namibia,” López Muñoz recollects.

Despite great experiences working with fishing communities, what he most enjoys is helping to develop new legislation for social services. Back in the 1993 he was part of a group of professionals which prepared the first regional law for social services. When taking his current role as deputy director  of social services, he was again entrusted with coordinating the preparation of the new regional Social Services Act. “This was challenging. A lot of things had changed since I last worked on legislation. For instance, Dependency Law had been already enacted,” Muñoz explains. However, he is pleased when the new Social Services Act was passed by the Galician Parliament in 2008, setting up a new catalogue of social rights.

The biggest challenge for social services across Europe is to deal with diversity: “We should very much respect diversity but, at the same time, build up a common conceptual reference: what a social need is; what a social right is; what are social services – and for that particular reason, something like ESN is not only advisable, but necessary.”

His message to young people starting careers in social services is quite direct: “Managing infrastructures or commerce can be perfectly done in a cold, sterile, distant way. But social services are about people - vulnerable people. A touch of passion is essential.”