Arcos de Valdevez

Arcos de Valdevez is one of the 10 cities of the district of Viana do Castelo, Sub-region Alto Minho and North Region of Portugal. This region borders with the region of Galicia in Spain and the two regions together constitute the Atlantic Axis European Region.  The city is a territory of opportunities and one of the attractive territories in terms of business location in the Alto Minho. This attractiveness is due to a vigorous policy of encouraging business reception, ranging from the provision of strategically located and infrastructures, to launching a set of incentives for the business establishment and a policy of close proximity to companies in the process of from the initial moment of the investment decision, to the licensing process, to the identification of sources of funding and to the recruitment of staff.

The municipality of Arcos de Valdevez has a set of social problems over which it is urgent to act in order to promote cohesion and local social development. The main challenges are:

• An ageing municipality with high levels of dependence, factors that in themselves constitute conditions of vulnerability to exclusion and social disintegration. This requires an ever-increasing investment effort in important policy fields as health, recreation spaces and activities and housing conditions, in order to provide the elderly with higher levels of quality of life;
• Migration of young people that it is necessary to retain in the territory and to attract more: To providing the territory with structures to retain young people requires taking advantage of a whole range of local potentialities (environmental, touristic, cultural, productive, among others), in order to consolidate the attractiveness of the municipality and its consequent geographical and social rejuvenation.

Being part of the “Volunteering Cities” permits to support the systematizing of the work that has been developed in the social area of the city. It will contribute to create a model of work in the social area more participatory and that will involve several social groups of the community and several areas of knowledge. It will also create the conditions for a more active, partisan and, above ali, more organized volunteering work. It will help to reorganize the local social network, namely through committees to work on each social group and the exchange and learning process will be fundamental.