“Without recognizing the community and one's own historicity, work cannot be done in and with communities”

Interview with Lucía Vivanco based on her forty years of professional practice in Chile

Abstract

Lucía Vivanco Muñoz is an occupational therapist who graduated from the University of Chile in 1983 and is one of the pioneers in the development of a social and community Occupational Therapy in Chile. In this interview, conducted by her colleague Débora Grandón, she analyzes the development of a social and community Occupational Therapy throughout her involvement at the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s in non-traditional areas such as accompanying people living with HIV/AIDS, the deinstitutionalization of vulnerable children, and their reintegration into their families and communities. She also participated in designing public policies for overcoming poverty within the Chilean government and other countries in her role as a consultant for the World Bank. She is currently an academic at the School of Occupational Therapy at the University of Santiago de Chile -USACH. This experience as an initiator of areas of practice established today in the exercise of the profession has a relevant historical value and constitutes a significant contribution to the development of these fields and the training of new generations.