Every week, Metzineres’ interdisciplinary community street outreach team goes out into the streets of El Raval and other areas of the city to support womxn who are surviving multiple situations of vulnerability, violence, and housing exclusion.
The everyday violence, emotional burdens, personal impacts, institutional barriers, and stigma that womxn experiencing homelessness often face when trying to access services and resources mean that many are left outside standardized support systems and do not feel able to approach them.
The community street outreach work we carry out goes beyond providing holistic support, building bonds, listening without judgment, and creating relationships of trust based on respect, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care. It also means recognizing that each womxn has her own timing, needs, and survival strategies.
The support we provide is interdisciplinary and holistic. The team is made up of professionals from the social, health, psychological, and legal fields, as well as people with lived experience. This enables us to offer flexible responses adapted to each specific situation: from social and health support, emotional accompaniment, and legal advice, to coordination, referrals, and follow-up with other services linked to basic rights such as housing, healthcare, and documentation.
Many of the womxn we support carry bags, belongings, and life stories marked by violence, the feminization of poverty, and stigma. Street outreach allows us to reach them from a different place: through proximity, continuity, and recognition of their autonomy.
This approach also creates spaces for collective empowerment. Sharing information, experiences, and strategies among peers helps build support networks and community-based forms of protection and self-care. In this sense, the street also becomes a political space from which to defend rights and denounce the structural violence that cuts across women’s homelessness.
In Barcelona, women’s homelessness continues to be particularly invisibilized. Many women do not literally sleep on the street, but move through situations of inadequate housing, squats, temporary stays on sofas, or unsafe spaces. This reality is often left out of statistics and traditional care models. At Metzineres, we work precisely to make these realities visible and to generate appropriate responses from a feminist and community-based perspective.
As relevant project data, we highlight that in 2025, 395 different womxn were supported through the various sheltering environments deployed by Metzineres —89% of whom were experiencing homelessness and 79% of whom were roofless—, and 85 of them were new participants. This demonstrates the scale of this reality and the lack of specific spaces adapted to their needs.
Secondly, the implementation of the project has contributed to mitigating the risks associated with life on the street and the structural violence that particularly affects womxn. During this period, 45 outreach sessions were carried out, resulting in 146 direct support actions and reaching 35 womxn already linked to the organization, as well as 15 womxn who were not yet familiar with our project.
This support included active listening, needs assessment, guidance on available resources, and occasional or ongoing accompaniment to facilitate access to social, health, or legal services. The continued presence on the street has made it possible to sustain bonds with womxn who are often left outside institutional care systems and to facilitate gradual processes of connection with Metzineres.
The project has been developed with the support of Ajuntament de Barcelona.
