In September, more than 80 children and their families from the Santa Bárbara and Szczesny neighborhoods of Apóstoles (Misiones) took part in a day-long event where, in the same place and on the same day, they were able to receive a medical check-up, obtain their Work Booklet (Libreta de Trabajo), get advice on their labor rights, and watch their children take part in educational and recreational activities. That simultaneity reflects the way DYA understands community work must be carried out in the field.

At DYA, we approach community work through the lens of corresponsibility, the principle underlying Argentina's Comprehensive System for the Protection of the Rights of Children and Adolescents: guaranteeing those rights does not depend on a single actor, but involves the State at its different levels, institutions, and the community, each contributing from its own specific role. We start from the understanding that the problems a family faces (health, education, work, rights) do not appear in isolation, and for that reason cannot be resolved by a single institution or a single discipline either.

Our work is to bring those parts together, to convene the organizations each issue requires, to make use of the day-to-day relationship we build in the territory, and to create spaces where those different responses reach people together, in the same place and on the same day, to those who need them. No single institution takes on this approach alone, it is built among all of them.

That was the logic behind Thursday's event in Santa Bárbara and Szczesny: health, labor, and education coming together in a single operation, because that is how families actually experience their needs.

The event grew out of a concrete need identified in the field itself. "This comprehensive outreach day came about because of a request from the teachers, who noticed, in their everyday work with children and adolescents, that they needed health and dental checkups, and that their families also needed to be able to talk about their rights, in this case their labor rights," explains Norma López, DYA's territorial representative in Misiones.

Based on that need identified in the daily work of the Programa Contener, the network was set in motion: "We brought the institutions together, RENATRE, UATRE, the municipality, which always supports us and gives us the chance to talk things through, coordinate actions, and carry them out, the Ministry of Labor through COPRETI, and us, Desarrollo y Autogestión, who have been working in this territory for several years now," López adds.

That is where the core of how DYA works lies. DYA arrives in the field with the ability to identify what is needed, drawing on the day-to-day relationship it maintains with the community, and with the ability to bring together those who can provide each of those responses. DYA's role is to build the bridge between institutions and families, each contributing from its own specific function, so that care reaches people as a complete whole.