Specialists from the municipal Office for Religious Affairs (OAR) offered the city’s firefighting corps a training session on ways of communicating and engaging with different communities in the city, the goal being more efficient and effective communication on prevention, good practice and rescue.
Staff from the Barcelona Fire Service received the training session this morning, with content designed by the City Council’s Office for Religious Affairs and outlining the different religious traditions in the city.
The OAR is a leading service on religious matters and awareness, particularly for religious communities and organisations in the city. The office works to guarantee the right to religious freedom and awareness, and to reduce inequalities and access difficulties which arise in this sphere.
The session included an introduction to the city’s religious plurality, and offered tools, resources and knowledge to help manage diversity in the realm of risk prevention.
The goals of the three-hour session were to:
- Outline the reality of religious diversity in Barcelona for the city’s firefighting corps.
- Facilitate knowledge of the different religious traditions in the city.
- Detect practices or rituals that may involve a risk for the various communities.
The session covered the profiles at places of worship in Barcelona, the sacred nature of various objects, rituals which may involve risks (candles, incense, crowding etc.) and the different uses made of some spaces.
Thanks to training of this type, communicating prevention advice may be more effective and better adapted to all the realities of the city.