Starting this month, Sonae Sierra and the Alzheimer Portugal Association will have another meeting place to hold sessions at Café Memória, in Loures. For the same, they have the support of the Municipality of Loures and Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Loures.
The sessions of the new space will take place on the second Saturdays of each month, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, in the Municipal Archive of Loures. The first session will be on November 13th.
Elsa Monteiro, Sustainability Director at Sonae Sierra, highlights: “It is with great pleasure that we continue to expand the Café Memória project, especially after such a turbulent period. This is the second new meeting place we opened this year, which attests to the urgency of the initiative for the population facing dementia problems and their caregivers.”
Manuela Morais, President of the National Board of the Alzheimer Portugal Association, adds: “The Café Memória is a proximity response. The possibility of holding these meetings in various locations across the country is what makes this project so important to the people who attend. We are very grateful for the commitment of the municipality of Loures, which committed to signing the protocol that will allow us to increase this response in the Greater Lisbon area.”
Café Memória is a specific response for People with Dementia and their Caregivers, friends and family, which aims to reduce social isolation and contribute to the improvement of their quality of life, as well as raising awareness in the community of the growing relevance of the theme of dementias, thus decreasing the stigma associated with it.
The network currently has 22 physical spaces prepared to host meetings in various parts of the country (Almada, Barcelos, Barreiro, Braga, Cascais, Évora, Esposende, Guimarães, Lisbon – in four locations, Madeira, Mirandela, Oeiras, Pombal, Porto , Sesimbra, Sintra, Viana do Castelo, Viseu, and now Loures).
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Café Memória also started to hold virtual sessions, so that people with memory problems or dementia and their families and caregivers could continue to have support. Online sessions continue to take place every Saturday at 10:30 am, with a duration of 1:30 am.
In total, the Cafés Memória network has already held close to 1000 in-person sessions and, since April last year, 80 online sessions. This digital format has had an average of around 80 participants per session.
