The main activities of Support-Girona are to defend the rights of the people being assisted as well as support, promote, develop, and extend the rights of persons with psychosocial, intellectual, cognitive, or age-related disabilities. Moreover, it makes efforts to help them pursue their well-being with dignity and preserve their autonomy through legal assistance and social support.

These activities were carried out since 2003 until the reform of legal capacity in 2021, within the scope of the ‘institutions for the protection of the person’ as regulated in the Civil Code of Catalonia, when a judge resolved to commission legal assistance in the matters deemed appropriate (i.e., guardianship and curatorship, legal defence, and de facto guardian), and since 2011 when the own person requested such support at the courts (i.e., mechanism of assistance) or commissioned through a power of attorney.

On October 15, 2015, Support-Girona provided its first support through assistance. In our mission to provide global and individual support to persons with disabilities and promoting their social inclusion and human rights, we at Support-Girona are convinced that the assistance mechanism is the best way to offer supported decision-making services and handle such decisions with constancy and dedication in a close and proactive manner so as to promote social inclusion and help people live independent lives within their communities. Supported decision-making refers to the practices, arrangements, relationships, and adjustments designed to enable persons with disabilities to make their own decisions about the course of their lives, which includes determining how these decisions are to be delivered and put into practice.

As of September 3, 2021, Support-Girona provides support in accordance with the legal reform at both national and Catalan levels, based on the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). On this date, the state Law 8/2021 entered into force, reforming the civil and procedural legislation in support of the exercise of the legal capacity of persons with disabilities (i.e., abolishing disability, guardianship and parental rights extended/reinstated in adults). Moreover, the Catalan decree-law 19/2021 also entered into force on this date, temporarily regulating the support mechanisms for the exercise of the legal capacity of persons with disabilities and determining that assistance service is the core mechanism of support that, in Catalonia, replaces and abolishes not only guardianship and parental rights extended/reinstated in adults, as in the state reform, but also curatorship.

The codification commission of the Government of Catalonia is working on the global reform of Title II of the Civil Code of Catalonia towards a comprehensive approach for all supporting institutions, which is in line with CRPD.