The Secretariat for Social Assistance (SNAS) of the Ministry of Social Development and Assistance, Family and Fight against Hunger – MDS (which during 2019-2022 was designated Ministry of Citizenship – MC), by means of an inter-federative SUAS management structure. Funding is co-participatory between the three levels of government: municipal, state and federal.

States and, above all, Municipalities, through republics managed with the support of CREAS technical teams, or by teams hired and supervised by a CREAS.

The Service was instituted and regulated from the Brazilian Typification of Social Assistance Services, published on November 11, 2009, and reissued in 2014¹.

Currently in operation.

It is mainly a temporary institutional (housing) sheltering service, which serves as a component of family support, promotion of citizenship, preventing isolation, etc.

N/A

Young people between 18 and 21 years old after graduating from SAI, adults in the process of leaving the streets and the elderly able to independently develop activities of daily living.

Forms of access:

• By referral of institutional agents of the Specialized Service in Social Approach;

• By referrals from CREAS, other social assistance services and/or other public policies;

• Spontaneous demand.

Eligibility is assessed by the social assistance teams themselves, with vacancies allocated according to the order in which the benefit was applied for, prioritizing cases referred by other High Complexity Social Protection services and, above all, according to referrals from the Rights Guarantee System (SGD).[i]

There is a systemic effort to register benefited people in the Single Registry, although this is not a requirement for access to the service. The registration of beneficiaries in the Single Registry is done to enable referencing to other policies to which the person is eligible.

The information declared to the Single Registry is fundamentally self-declaratory. The Single Registry makes annual cross-checks with other administrative records to validate its information, which is self-declared by the population. However, cases of inconsistency identified by these checks do not result in interruptions to access nationally defined SUAS services, though they may affect eligibility for other programs with more parametric criteria, such as the Bolsa Familia Program (PBF) and the Continuous Cash Benefit (BPC). Yet, the link with SAR generates an opportunity to update the registration of its beneficiaries whose declared information may be questioned by cross-checks with other databases.

Although the Monthly Service Record System (RMA) of SUAS does not provide inputs to estimate the coverage of SAR taken individually, the SUAS Census Sheltering Units express the aggregate coverage of the SAI and the Communal Housing Service (SAR), indicating 1,047,063.00 individual beneficiaries per year².

Subsidized housing for homeless or self-supporting individuals who are willing to cohabit with peers and manage their housing independently, with support from a social assistance team..

The social assistance team also offers services and activities to support the full achievement of autonomy and insertion into the job market. There is freedom to determine these activities and services according to each context, but generally these should be guided by categories such as those listed in RMA for monitoring the initiative.

• Systematic activities:

  • Home visits of the Unit's technical team to the user's family;

  • Meetings with groups of families;

  • Individualized psychosocial care;

  • Psychosocial care in groups;

  • Psychosocial care of the families of the people sheltered (family guidance);

  • Lectures / workshops;

  • Preparation of technical reports on cases under monitoring;

  • Discussion of cases with other professionals in the network;

  • Referral for documents to be collected;

  • Outings with beneficiaries;

  • Promotes family contact and participation in the lives of beneficiaries;

  • Promotes activities with Community participation;

  • Promotes the participation of those in existing services, projects or activities in the community; 

  • Submission of semi-annual report to the Judiciary Branch (exclusive for child/adolescent foster care);

  • School monitoring;

  • Organization and discussion of the routines of the Units with those being sheltered.

• Activities to support children/adolescents transitioning to adulthood:

  • Support for young graduates for professional qualification and paid work;

  • Support for continuity of studies;

  • Referral to communal housing;

  • Identification of parental network, friends who can support adolescents in this new phase;

  • Activities that develop autonomy regarding the use and management of money;

  • Activities that develop autonomy regarding self-care and home care;

  • Activities that develop autonomy regarding the use of public and community services.

    
     

Beneficiaries now reside in the republics (co-habited and co-managed residences), where they receive additional social assistance support.

SUAS funding is shared by the three levels of government (Federal Government, states and municipalities). Resources are allocated in blocks and minimums, which have some flexibility to finance the various SUAS initiatives (see Policy Brief on SUAS financing). The table below illustrates the budget executions (co-financing) of the Federal Government for discretionary actions of the National Secretariat for Social Assistance/ Social Assistance Fund (SNAS/FNAS) between 2002 and 2022 (in real values corrected to December 31, 2022). These values encompass the entire universe of services, programs, costing of management activities and investment of SUAS, so they do not refer only to the costs of SAR.

Federal budget executions with discretionary actions of SNAS/ FNAS between 2002 and 2022 (in real values adjusted for December 31, 2022)[i]

[ii] Minimum values extracted from (GoB, Min. Social Development 2023a) and associated with specific services according to the authors' interpretation from (GoB, Min. Social Development 2013; Public Prosecutor's Office of Bahia, n.d.) 

A quasi-experimental academic study points out that the implementation of SUAS generated expansion and improvement in the provision of services, as well as improvement of administrative capacity at the municipal level, even controlling for more specific political factors³

There are none, as the initiative is restricted to those over 18 years old, since it requires autonomy for management with greater independence of housing.

Communal housing should be organized into male units and female units, to protect the intimacy of the people benefited and reduce the risk of sexual violence and harassment among cohabitants.

Guidelines and references for other networks such as education, health and basic social protection, of medium and high complexity, in addition to interaction with the SGD.

The specific adaptations of SAR varied greatly in each context, given the flexibility of state and municipal teams to adapt according to the specific needs of each context. However, there was a set of more structuring actions with an effect on SUAS in general, such as:

• Several municipal teams developed voluntary joint efforts to support the application for Emergency Aid (AE, acronym in Portuguese) via application, although SUAS was not directly involved in AE.

• The Federal Government maintained the IGD-Aid payments even with the temporary suspension of SUAS responsibilities in support of the program (and the PBF program itself) in 2020 and much of 2021.

• The Federal Government generated instructional material with service protocols considering the challenge of avoiding agglomeration.

• Through Ordinance MC No. 369, of April 29, 2020, the Federal Government distributed R$ 2.4 billion to SUAS as extraordinary credit distributed as follows among the municipalities with the highest prevalence of elderly, PwD, migrants and homeless people:

  • R$ 9.1 million was transferred to the interiorization of Venezuelan migrants and refugees;

  • R$ 158.1 million were allocated to the purchase of PPE for SUAS professionals working on the front line, serving, for example, sheltered elderly, homeless people and victims of rights violation;

  • R$ 185.6 million were transferred to the purchase of food from the elderly and people with disabilities served in the SUAS network;

  • R$ 577.7 million for the co-financing of social assistance actions, according to the needs of each location considering the pandemic.

• Through Ordinances MC No. 378, of May 7, 2020, and MC No. 468, of August 13, 2020, R$ 1.5 billion were also transferred to: (a) the reorganization of activities in SUAS units; (b) the purchase of other items necessary to deal with the emergency; or (c) the expansion of social assistance offers during the pandemic. Of these:

  • R$ 1 billion was specifically intended to reinforce basic social protection actions;

  • R$ 437.2 million were specifically intended to reinforce Specialized Social Protection actions^4,5,6.

In addition to the transfer of funds, several technical guidance notes on work in the context of the pandemic were released by the MDS.

1. GoB, Min. Desenvolvimento Social. 2009. Tipificação Nacional de Serviços Socioassistenciais - Texto da RESOLUÇÃO No. 109, DE 11 DE NOVEMBRO DE  2009. https://www.prattein.com.br/home/images/stories/PDFs/Tipificacao_AS.pdf.
GoB, Min. Desenvolvimento Social. 2014. Tipificação Nacional de Serviços Socioassistenciais. https://central.to.gov.br/download/231761.

2.  GoB, Min. Cidadania 2022. Censo SUAS e RMA – Bases e Resultados > Censo SUAS 2021 - CREAS”. 3 de agosto de 2022. https://aplicacoes.mds.gov.br/snas/vigilancia/index2.php.

3. Cavalcante, Pedro, e Beatriz Bernarde Ribeiro. 2012. “O Sistema Único de Assistência Social: resultados da implementação da política nos municípios brasileiros”. Rev. Adm. Pública 46 (dezembro). https://www.scielo.br/j/rap/a/bwPZgHkvMbPcWCcYcgKHtPb/?lang=pt#.