Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning:From Hull-House To the Children's Protective Society

Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 128 Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning: From Hull-House To the Children’s Protective Society Cómo referenciar este artículo / How to cite this article Olmeda, G. J., Garrido, L. C., & Martín-Ondarza Santos, M. del P. (2025). Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning: From Hull-House To the Children’s Protective Society. Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, 12(1), pp. 128-140. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/ete.12107 Gonzalo Jover Olmeda e-mail: [email protected] ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6373-4111 Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España Laura Camas Garrido* e-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8077-2358 Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España Mª del Prado Martín-Ondarza Santos e-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5334-397X Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España Abstract: This article examines the historical antecedents of Service Learning (SL) programs by analyzing two pioneering institutions: Hull House in Chicago and the Children’s Protective Society in Madrid. Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, emerged as a transformative social and educational center in response to the socio-economic challenges of Chicago’s industrialization. It provided a space for cultural exchange, education, and social reform, emphasizing democratic ideals, community collaboration, and moral education. Addams’s approach sought to bridge social gaps and empower disadvantaged populations, particularly immigrant children and youth. On the other side of the Atlantic, Julio Vizcarrondo y Coronado, a Puerto Rican abolitionist and social reformer, co-founded the Children’s Protective Society in 1878. This institution addressed the dire needs of abandoned and impoverished children in Madrid, offering them shelter, education, and healthcare. Rooted in progressive ideals and inspired by philanthropic models from England and the United States, it implemented innovative educational practices and collaborated with universities to enhance children’s well-being. Although neither institution explicitly defined itself as an SL initiative, their commitment to integrating social action with education and fostering community engagement positions them as foundational models for SL. By examining their historical and ideological connections, this study highlights the shared values of civic responsibility and academic collaboration that continue to inform contemporary SL programs. These early efforts underscore the potential of education as a transformative tool for addressing social inequities and fostering democratic participation. Keywords: History of Education, Service-Learning, Civic Education, Community Development. Received: 22-04-2025 Accepted: 02-06-2025 129 Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning: From Hull-House To the Children’s Protective Society 1. Introduction Along with Toynbee in London, Hull-House in Chicago is considered the main institutional forerunner of Service Learning (SL) experiences. Founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in response to the situation of neglect of European immigrants to Chicago, its innovative nature made it the paradigm of settlements that were springing up throughout the United States. The national and international literature, however, usually overlooks earlier experiences, such as the Children’s Protective Society founded in Madrid in 1878 by a Puerto Rican-born abolitionist, Julio Vizcarrondo y Coronado and Cristóbal Colón de la Cerca, to provide shelter, health care, and education to poor, abandoned children. Built on the model of nineteenth-century philanthropic societies, it was not lacking in links to university chairs. This article explores the historical precursors to modern SL programs, focusing on two key institutions: Hull House in Chicago and the Children’s Protective Society in Madrid. The introduction provides an overview of their historical significance, noting Hull House’s role in addressing the challenges of urban industrialization and the Children’s Protective Society’s efforts in child protection and education in Spain. Subsequent sections delve into Jane Addams’s Hull House, emphasizing its dual role as a social center and educational hub, and its influence on democratic ideals and moral education. The narrative then shifts to Julio Vizcarrondo’s leadership in the Children’s Protective Society, detailing its philanthropic activities and innovative approaches to child welfare and education. The article concludes by connecting these institutions to the development of SL programs, discussing their shared values of community service, social action, and collaboration with academic institutions 2. Jane Addams’s Hull-House: A Center for Living, Research and Social Transformation In the late 19th century, Chicago was an emerging city immersed in one of the most precocious processes of industrialization in America. A few short years after the well-known and devastating Chicago fire, the ‘Windy City’ underwent the greatest demographic growth in its history. Thousands of people from different parts of the world flocked to this industrial manufacturing center in search of better opportunities, thereby turning it into one of the most culturally diverse and plural cities of its day. And while the cultural melting pot was deemed to be a fundamental feature in its characterization, poverty, the lack of resources, the housing shortage, child labor, poor sanitary hygiene, unhealthy conditions, and the fragile sewage system and public infrastructure in the underprivileged neighborhoods soon became the protagonists of the time. Massive industrialization led to a huge social divide, and unsurprisingly, movements arose in response to that gap such as the settlements, aimed at sharing knowledge and culture and reducing poverty. In the face of such abject poverty and misery, dehumanization, and injustice, in September 1889, after a two-year journey around Europe and influenced by the settlement movement, Laura Jane Addams and Ellen Gate Starr opened a large and versatile space for shelter and community. The objective was “to respond all sides of the neighborhood life: not to the poor people alone, nor to the well-to-do, young in contradistinction to the old, but to the neighborhood as a whole” (Addams, 2002a, p. 45), and thus it became a pioneer in attempting to explore and reflect on the social function of democracy. Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 130 Gonzalo Jover Olmeda / Laura Camas Garrido / Mª del Prado Martín-Ondarza Santos In the heart of one of the humblest and most impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago, at the intersection of Polk and South Halstead, one of the main thoroughfares in the city, a space gradually emerged that brimmed with opportunities because of its diversity as well as its ‘variety of activity’, and named after the building’s original owner, Charles Hull. Its location was no coincidence, since around it were a great many different ‘colonies’ of people from different cultures from myriad places, especially Europe, who took up in small neighborhoods: Italians, Germans, Irish, French Canadians, Poles, and Russians. Thus was the birth of Hull-House, a sprawling, archaic residence that had a spacious entry hall lined with five fireplaces that, in Addams’s own words, gave it ‘a gracious aspect’ (Addams, 2002a, p. 44). Chicago’s very first social center was characterized by its easy accessibility, its hospitality and its tolerance, based on a cooperative system of residence where the residents “have an opportunity of seeing institutions from the recipient’s standpoint, of catching the spirit of the original impulse which founded them” (Addams, 2002a, p. 50). The institution featured a wide variety of spaces for both public and private use. The most well-known of the private areas were the apartments, while the main public spaces were the central kitchen, dining room, bathrooms, gymnasium, swimming pool, music rooms with instruments and all, an office of information for foreigners, parlors, reading rooms, art exhibits, and nursery. But the origins of Hull-House went beyond sociocultural development of the time. Rather, it enveloped a pedagogical program geared toward the search for social transformation. One of Addams’s greatest concerns was the underprivileged situation of children and youth, with high rates of delinquency and few opportunities for education. The families’ precarious situation, a severe shortage of schools, and a burgeoning supply of jobs drew minors prematurely into joining the labor force while still in their childhood. To Addams, the young immigrants were the repositories of society’s hopes, aspirations, enthusiasm, and eagerness for progress in that time. The regenerative impulse toward social reform was being thwarted and wasted by the imposition of the paces of modern industrial society (Addams, 1909). Therefore, following Addams assumptions, “young people are to be protected from the darker and coarser dangers of the city” (Addams, 1912b, p. 323). With those motivations, the Hull-House community set up its main projects, the first of which were, not surprisingly, the nursery school and kindergarten: “Every morning miniature Italians, Hebrews, French, Irish, and Germans assemble in our drawingroom, and nothing seems to excite admiration in the neighborhood so much as the fact that we ‘put up with them’” (Addams, 2002a, p. 50). The kindergarten was a scenario of constant learning in which it was not difficult to appreciate the social differences generated by modern life. Beyond offering a service to the community, the nursery was based on the social commitment adopted by the community, as it constituted, “to a certain extent, a neighbourhood affair” (Addams, 2002a, p. 51). A few years after its inauguration, dozens of young people came to the center to meet and socialize there. The desire for personal betterment and an eagerness to study and to debate were characteristic of the young people who frequented Hull-House (Addams, 1909). There were also youth clubs interested in debating living conditions and other social and political issues affecting the city, such as the Young Citizen’s Club and The Colombian Guards. In these clubs, writing and debating practices were continuously present. Questions like “Which is more powerful, the pen or the sword?”, “Should women be allowed to vote?”, and “What is stronger, the desire for fame or 131 Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning: From Hull-House To the Children’s Protective Society wealth?” were some of the topics they discussed. Some reading clubs focused on reviewing classic and popular books such as David Copperfield (1849), Ivanhoe (1819), or The Pickwick Papers (1836), redirecting these reviews into exercises of debate and collective reflection. Youth clubs at Hull-House organized parties that promoted healthy recreation. The young people themselves were the ones who “carefully maintain their standard of entrance so that the most cautious mother may feel safe when her daughter goes to one of our parties” (Addams, 1912b, p. 349). Hilda Satt Polacheck was one of those eager young activists who took part in the early years of Hull-House. Barely ten years old, she had immigrated with her Jewish family from Poland to Chicago in 1892. In her autobiographical book I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, edited by Polacheck (1991), she later recounted that “I was not only hungry for books, music, and all the arts and crafts offered at Hull-House, but I was starved for the social stimulus of people my own age. All this was to be found at the house on Halsted and Polk streets” (Polacheck, 1991, p. 68). In addition to filling the young people’s needs for recreation and amusement, Hull-House also held a wide variety of courses on myriad areas of knowledge. The so-called College Extension was linked to the University of Chicago and taught university courses to address the growing demand for instruction of the younger residents and the neighborhood (Addams, 2002a). Hundreds of young people attended the college classes, eager to share their knowledge and life with neighbors and residents in the area. The trimester-long classes were organized into blocks that consisted of a total of 35 hours distributed over twelve weeks, with a curriculum that mainly covered mathematics, physics, and literature: What is now known as the College Extension course, a series of lectures and classes held in the evening on the general plan of University Extension, had its origin in an informal club which, during the first winter, read ‘Romola’ with the original residents (Addams, 2002a, p. 48). With the students themselves as tutors, the university courses held debate groups, talks, and conferences with reform-minded leaders and university professors such as George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. Given the continual educational interventions in the community, Hull-House gradually became one of the first university extension centers in the nation. However, rather than reproducing the university culture dominant at that time, Hull-House took great pains to find its own academic culture: The residents of Hull-House feel increasingly that the educational efforts of a Settlement should not be directed primarily to reproduce the college type of culture, but to work out a method and an ideal adapted to the immediate situation. They feel that they should promote a culture which will not set its possessor aside in a class with others like himself, but which will, on the contrary, connect him with their present surroundings with the historic background (Addams, 1912b, p. 436). For Addams, education, and moral education in particular, was considered the backbone and channel on the path toward achieving the democratic ideal of class Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 132 Gonzalo Jover Olmeda / Laura Camas Garrido / Mª del Prado Martín-Ondarza Santos equality, bridging the social gap, and progress: “the sphere of morals is the sphere of action” (Addams, 1905, p. 285). At Hull-House, teaching was not understood only from the conceptual manifestation of reality, but rather, it needed “to be diffused in a social atmosphere” (Addams, 1912b, p. 427). Although it is true that institution became a center of social experimentation that caught the scholars’ attention, Jane Addams was reticent to acknowledge the institution as a sociological laboratory. Instead, she highlighted its deeply human nature whose function lay in becoming aware of the main concerns and promoting neighborhood action: I have always objected to the phrase ‘sociological laboratory’ applied to us, because Settlements should be something much more human and spontaneous than such a phrase connotes, and yet it is inevitable that the residents should know their own neighborhoods more thoroughly than any other, and that their experiences there should affect their convictions (Addams, 1912b, p. 210). It was therefore not only about acting but also about reflecting on the underlying causes of the needs to be acted upon. Hence, the community joined forces to comprehend and understand the different social realities that coexisted in the community. Diagnostic reports were drawn up by the center’s users, and “the educational effort of Hull-House has always been held by the residents to be subordinate to its social life, and, as it were, a part of it” (Addams, 2002a, p. 48). An example of this effort was the publication of what would be one of Addams’s first pieces of research, Hull-House Maps and Papers, a minutely detailed study made with the residents analyzing dimensions regarding poverty, wages, housing, ghettos, immigrants, and labor exploitation in the neighborhood (Residents of Hull-House, 1895). The intent was for the neighborhood’s aspirations to be “recognized and stimulated, and the means of attaining them put at their disposal” (Addams, 2002a, p. 53). This way of thinking necessitated stepping back from any anticipated assumption that projected the neighborhood’s needs a priori. Rather, it meant “keep[ing] ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt our undertakings as we discovered those things which the neighborhood was ready to accept” (Addams, 1912b, p. 132). But, at this point, what led Addams to found HullHouse? In the next section we take a closer look at the days when Addams was pondering the founding of Hull-House. 3. An Extraordinary Moral Reaction In December 1887, young Addams began her second trip to Europe, which took her to London in 1888, where she visited Toynbee Hall, the pioneer social settlement founded by Samuel Augustus Barnett and his wife Henrietta in London’s East End in 1884. Addams later referred to Toynbee Hall as the precursor that gave her the idea of “a new line of approach to the age-old problems of poverty in which understanding and friendship are so essential” (Bryan, Bair, & De Angury, 2009, p. 493). A few months earlier, during that same trip, Addams had traveled to several cities in Spain, including Madrid, where what she called the ‘moral reaction’ of creating Hull-House took place. On Sunday, April 22, most likely at the bullring in Fuente del Berro in Madrid, 133 Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning: From Hull-House To the Children’s Protective Society Addams went to a bullfight with her travel mates Sarah Anderson and Ellen Gates Starr. They had gotten the idea from Henrietta Brewster Vizcarrondo, an American citizen living in Madrid and wife of writer, journalist, and liberal politician Julio Vizcondo y Coronado, born in Puerto Rico, where he had worked diligently in favor of abolition. The bullfight was chronicled as “a chilly, windy, and occasionally rainy afternoon; the fight treacherous and full of nasty surprises of all kinds.” The bulls were from the ranch of Juan Vázquez and fought by matadors Lagartijo, Hermosilla, and Guerrita, and several horses were gored (Peña & Goñi, 1888). In a letter to her sister-in-law Laura Shoemaker Addams several days later, Jane described that day’s experience: The great event of our stay in Madrid after all was the thing we are all rather ashamed of—and that was a bull fight or Testa del Toros (sic) as we rather prefer to call it. The ring or amphitheater itself was an immense affair with stone seats for eight or ten tiers, and the upper rows of wooden seats with a covering where we sat. (…). We got there just as the first grand procession was in the ring, and just as they went out the bull came rushing in. He was a beautiful creature, as lithe and active as a cat, and as fleet and graceful as a deer with nothing of the awkwardness one associates with a bull. The picadors (sic) are the two men mounted on horses who irritate the bull with long wooden lances until he rushes into them and kills the horses. The first bull killed four horses, two under each picador, he made a wild rush followed by a grand mileè of horse and rider, the rider invariably being pulled out unhurt and the horse lying dead. That was the worst part of it. The second act of six men tiring and bewildering the bull with their bright red cloaks was graceful and brilliant with no suggestion of danger. The bandelleros (sic) who struck the victim with the gaily decorated little swords were in apparently greater danger than the matador himself, who did not come in until the bull was so tired out that it was a comparatively easy matter to kill, by one clever stroke into his spinal cord. There were six bulls killed that afternoon, but we did not stay until the bitter end although we were rather ashamed and surprised to find that we were brutal enough to take a great interest in it. The immense audience was either wild with delight or uproarious with hisses every minute, even throwing hats and oranges at the head of an awkward matador (Bryan et al., 2009, p. 603). The recreation Addams made of this situation two decades later, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Hull-House, gave it a different meaning, less festive and much more profound, marking it as the origin of her determination to create the institution. Addams did not recall how the plan of its creation came to her, nor “to have mentioned this plan to any one until we reached Madrid in April, 1888” (Addams, 1912b, p. 85). The decisive point of her determination was the re-elaboration of her initial indifference toward the brutality of what had happened that afternoon in the ring, which she had watched with the admiration of one who feels herself facing the historical survival of the ancient spectacles in an amphitheater. The reaction came at nighttime, “and in deep chagrin I felt myself tried and condemned, not only by this disgusting experience but by the entire moral situation which it revealed” (Addams, 1912b, p. 86). She felt that her penchant for study and inquiry that led her to take this trip to Europe may hide a wish to put off the need to take action indefinitely. “Nothing less than the moral reaction following the experience at a bull-fight had been able to reveal to me that so far from following in the wake of a chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to the tail of the veriest ox-cart of self-seeking. I had made up my Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 134 Gonzalo Jover Olmeda / Laura Camas Garrido / Mª del Prado Martín-Ondarza Santos mind that next day, whatever happened, I would begin to carry out the plan, if only by talking about it” (Addams, 1912b, pp. 86-87). The claim may therefore be made that Hull-House was conceived out of a searing moral reaction, of the awareness of indifference to the suffering represented in a bullfight. To counter this representation, Jane Addams used Hull-House as an active opposite response to the conventionalisms of the time, or as Binetti (2016) says, a place that is the antithesis of masculine space, competitive and violent. We know that the day after the bullfight, Addams and her entourage went ‘to a five o’clock tea’ at Henrietta and Julio Vizcarrondo’s home (Bryan et al., 2009, p. 602). The Vizcarrondos hosted their entire visit to Madrid. As Addams commented in the same letter to her sister-in-law referred to earlier, Mrs. Vizcarrondo “has been exceedingly devoted to us—and has done a great deal to give us a pleasant impression of Madrid” (Bryan et al., 2009, p. 602). At the same time, Mr. Vizcarrondo, as a Member of Parliament, was kind enough to take Addams and Starr to one of the sessions. Reconstructing the trip, the editors of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams noted that Addams’s experience at the bullring “served as the catalyst for action that resulted ultimately in the founding of the social settlement Hull-House in Chicago a year later” (Bryan et al., 2009, p. 600). They also make a fleeting reference to the institution that Julio Vizcarrondo had set up in Madrid along with Cristóbal Colón de la Cerca in 1879 to help poor homeless children: the Sociedad Protectora de los Niños de Madrid (Children’s Protective Society of Madrid), successor to the Asylum of San Ildefonso that Vizcarrondo had founded in Puerto Rico several years earlier (Bryan et al., 2009, p. 604, note 1). However, the editors do not establish any connections between the Addams’s catalytic stay in Madrid and the philanthropic undertakings of her hosts. Despite the lack of empirical proof of that connection, it is at least plausible that the Vizcarrondos may have told Addams about the Children’s Protective Society during her trip to Madrid in April 1888, and that she therefore knew of it even before her visit to Toynbee Hall in June of that same year. 4. Julio Vizcarrondo Coronado and the Children’s Protective Society In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Spain found itself in a historical context of reform and regeneration. A set of social, cultural, and educational changes were brought in from progressive social circles that significantly furthered the social policies and recognition of children’s needs. Much as happened in the Chicago of Jane Addams’s day, the transformations taking place in big cities in Spain were the consequence of industrialization and the shift from agriculture and farming to an industrial way of life, and they had deep-reaching consequences on the economy, politics, and society. The main cities undergoing industrialization were experiencing a major increase in population. This industrialization and urbanization process led to social problems due to “matters of housing, overcrowding, the working conditions and wages of unskilled workers, health and sanitary problems, cheap labor, food shortages, poverty” (Montero-Pedrera, 2001). In general, the economic and social situation of much if not most of the population of Spain in the late 19th century was marked by precariousness, backwardness, and scarcity. As a result, many children were exposed to an alarming degree of being abandoned, becoming beggars, child labor, becoming orphans, and hand-to-mouth survival in the face of the dangers of the streets, where much of their life was spent (López Núñez, 135 Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 Institutional Antecedents of Service Learning: From Hull-House To the Children’s Protective Society 1993). A law was subsequently passed to handle this situation—the Law on the Higher Council for the Protection of Children and Repression of Begging—in 1904, drafted by the pediatrician Manuel Tolosa Latour (Rodríguez Pérez & Canes Garrido, 2011). Following the wake of other countries’ experiences, several different charity, health care and educational institutions were founded in Spain, some by private initiative under a philanthropic perspective, and others through state and local administrations. Over time, they helped improve the medical, social, and educational situation of the most underprivileged children. One of the leading figures in the philanthropic movement was none other than Julio Vizcarrondo y Coronado, a multi-faceted social activist, advocate of human rights and children’s rights, and founder of the Children’s Protective Society of Madrid, a pioneer in providing social and educational attention to underprivileged children. Julio Vizcarrondo was born into a well-to-do family in the city of San Juan de Puerto Rico on December 9, 1829. There he grew up and went to school before going on to study in Madrid and Paris. He was one of an illustrious group of Puerto Ricans including José Acosta, Román Baldorioty, and others. Together they made up a generation of young intellectuals whose civic values drove them to confront the excesses of governors and to demand reforms in the island’s governance (Miller, 1922). Julio Vizcarrondo was a man of innovative, creative, tenacious and disciplined character, which led him to live a very intense and unique life marked by the ideal and the quest for equality for all human beings. His social activism and concern for improving the quality of life and education of unprotected children were key to his work as a journalist, writer, politician, businessman, and participant in charitable initiatives. Although his humanitarian work encompassed many different fields, Vizcarrondo was especially credited for his continual fight against slavery until it was finally abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873. In his work Antología Puertorriqueña, Fernández Juncos told that, from an early age, Vizcarrondo was noted for the generosity of his humanitarian sentiments, waging a strong campaign against the mistreatment of black slaves at some haciendas on the island. His sense of righteous and his decisive way of freely stating his liberal, reformist ideas earned him the enmity of the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie and led him into exile on several occasions. During his first exile, Julio Vizcarrondo settled in New York, where he stayed for four years. This period let him contact and interact with the most progressive political and cultural groups of the time, and he even became secretary of the Standing Committee of the Paris International Anti-Slavery Conference. It was in New York that he also met and married Henriette Brewster and Cornell, “a young American of exquisite culture and excellent character” (Fernández Juncos, 1911, p. 94), with whom he shared his abolitionist ideas. In 1854, on his return to his native country, he and his wife founded the San Ildefonso Asylum for the education of poor girls. That same year, he founded and directed the weekly El Mercurio, catalogued as a political periodical. His articles were aimed at spreading his liberal political and social ideas and in firm defense of the abolition of slavery, contrary to the prevailing ideology of the colonial regime. Practicing what he preached, he freed his own slaves. These actions resulted in new persecutions by the government, which led Julio Vizcarrondo to decide to move to Madrid in 1863 (Vivas, 1962). Once settled in Madrid, he continued with his firm commitment to combat slavery, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, v. 12, n. 1, January-June / Enero-Junio 2025, pp. 128-140. e-ISSN: 1698-7802 136 Gonzalo Jover Olmeda / Laura Camas Garrido / Mª del Prado Martín-Ondarza Santos seeking the collaboration and support of democrat politicians, economists and intellectuals, and on April 2, 1865 founded the Spanish Abolitionist Society. This society sought on the one hand to raise social awareness in favor of abolition through information activities and social movements, and, on the other, to garner political support to bring this reality to the Spanish Parliament, which was not then happening in Spain. As a propaganda medium for the anti-slavery political movement, the Society published the newspaper El Abolicionista Español. A great number of references can be found in relation to its philanthropic and humanitarian character at a time when the concept of social justice first made its appearance (Murillo Torrecilla & Hernández Castilla, 2011), a principle that led Vizcarrondo to collaborate with benefactor entities and to be a participant or main promoter of institutions dedicated to providing health, medical, educational, and shelter services to children and adults from the most disadvantaged classes. One of these initiatives was the foundation of the Children’s Protective Society of Madrid on 7 August 1878. It was created based on the English model, which he had learned of during his travels, and which “was based on five pillars: private association, partner-donors, support from the Aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie, an informative magazine and the creation of a children’s shelter” (Rodríguez Pérez & Canes Garrido, 2011, p. 3). His initial contacts with the people who joined him in this endeavor took place at the Ateneo de Madrid (Atheneum of Madrid). There he met his main founding partner, Cristóbal Colón de la Cerda, Duke of Veragua. Together they brought in other partners such as the pedagogue Pedro de Alcántara and the journalist Julio Nombela. They also sought support from the Real Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País (Madrid’s Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country) and obtained the cooperation of the Diócesis Madrileña as well as testimonial support from other personalities from aristocracy, politics, and the new bourgeoisie (Rodríguez Pérez, 2015). In 1881, the first issue of the Boletín de la Sociedad Protectora de los Niños (the Children’s Protective Society Bulletin) was published, setting out the legal norms for its governance. It was the first Spanish publication dedicated to the protection of children. It offered advice and guidance to mothers and society on health and medical hygiene, with the aim of reducing diseases and alleviating their consequences, as well as including the most noteworthy activities of the Society (Rodríguez Pérez, 2009). The children taken in by the Protective Society were left in the care of the St. Vincent de Paul Sisters of Charity. The objectives of society as set out in its Statutes involved actions for alleviating the main problems affecting children: early mortality, abandonment, neglect, mistreatment and exploitation of children, exposure to moral risks, etc. The Society relied on the Patronato de Señoras (Board of Women) which was in charge of various practical matters, such as visiting the establishments of the Society, dealing with the nuns who were in charge of the centers, keeping inventory of goods and resources, or intervening in the management and internal administration of the establishments. Its beginnings were modest. It began by taking in abused or indigent girls in a flat on San Marcos Street in Madrid but, little by little, it expanded its services, spaces, and the number of boys and girls to whom it provided free shelter, medical, and educational services (Rodríguez Pérez, 2015). In July 1889 Julio Vizcarrondo died suddenly. He was replaced by Pedro de Alcántara, who continued his work in the general secretariat of the Society, making it possible to