The director of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of the Environment, María Artola, has received the Silver Medal for Penitentiary Social Merit awarded to her by the Minister of the Interior, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, in a ceremony held this morning in Madrid at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.

This award, granted by the Secretary of State for Penitentiary Affairs, is a recognition of the work that the Biodiversity Foundation is carrying out through the “Oxygen Project”, whose main objective is the training of prison inmates through courses related to the environment that have been designed to facilitate their subsequent incorporation into the labor market.

The “Oxygen Project” has been operating with great success for a year at the Madrid IV Penitentiary Center in Navalcarnero and has allowed 18 inmates to have already obtained their qualifications in Gardening and Forestry Worker, the two modules of which this initiative consists. Likewise, on September 17, the institutions promoting the “Oxygen Project”, the Biodiversity Foundation, the Autonomous Organization of National Parks and the Autonomous Organization for Penitentiary Work and Training for Employment, signed the agreement for its implementation in the prisons of Madrid IV (Navalcarnero), Madrid I (Alcalá de Henares), Segovia, Algeciras, Madrid VI (Aranjuez) and Palma de Mallorca.