We are very saddened at the news of the death of Fernando Barreiro, a long-standing friend and colleague in the field of local development, one of the founders of LDnet and member of its board.
Fernando was born in Uruguay, moved to Spain in the 1970s as a refugee during the time of the Uruguayan Dictatorship and lived in Barcelona.
His professional work from the 1980s onwards covered several fields of local development, mainly in technical assistance to local employment initiatives, local public policies, urban development, third sector, etc.
He was member of the staff of the Barcelona City Council during the 1980s. He also founded an NGO called Proyecto Local, running local development projects between Spanish national and local authorities and Latin American local governments and universities, as well as cooperation projects with Morocco. These projects involved cooperation and transfer of experience between the EU and Latin America, as well as providing training in local development.
Fernando participated in several European programmes and networks, such as Leda, Employment Pacts, Urban,Youthstart, Equal, etc. He frequently collaborated with the LEED Programme of the OECD. He became involved in the URBACT programme from an early stage going on to assume the role of Lead Expert for Net Topic (2008-2010) and USER (2012-2015) networks. Most recently he was actively leading the URBInclusion network, tackling the issue of deprived neighbourhoods.
His wisdom and commitment to local development that were an inspiration to us all will be greatly missed!
Peter Ramsden, Jean-Pierre Pellegrin, Haris Martinos
December 2018
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