“We need to educate in the taste for responsibilities.” The seventh president of Òmnium Cultural, Jordi Porta i Ribalta, has bequeathed an essential commitment to understand the role of civil society in the permanent construction of the country.
Linked to scouting from a very young age, he participated in the ‘Caputxinada’, in the Edicions Catalanes de Paris that smuggled books into Northern Catalonia, in the Congrès de Cultura Catalana or in the Unesco Center. Apart, of course, from directing the Fundació Jaume Bofill and Enciclopèdia Catalana.
Without Porta, Òmnium Cultural would not be what it is or what it represents. He launched a deep and transformative reform of the entity: he modernized its professional structure and adapted its action to the reality of the moment. With him also began the path that would lead her to finance herself exclusively with her own resources. When he became president in 2002, there were 15,000 members in Òmnium “and every year 500 leave due to death.” When he left it in 2010, there were more than 21,500.
For Òmnium Cultural to be useful to the country, it had to look like it. That’s why, faithful to the idea of a single people and to an uncomplexed Catalanism, he overlapped the work for social cohesion with the Catalan language and culture, essential to build the future.
“The country needs people willing to work and Òmnium is one of the best antidotes against national resignation.” He himself picked up the phrase from a young man from Òmnium Alt Penedès, and it is that with the presidency of Porta he channels the political aspirations of an entire generation. He knew that the national struggle was linked to democracy, cultural development and social welfare, and he understood that the country needed to coordinate its forces and he got involved to achieve it.
From yesterday’s coherence and ambition to today’s persistent struggle. He was emphatic against the cuts in the Statute approved by the Parliament, before the Constitutional Court liquidated the sovereignty of the people of Catalonia in 2010. That same year, Òmnium organized the first great sovereignist mobilization with which the political cycle that crystallized on 1-O began.
He was never a member of any political party, so as not to compromise his spaces, and at the time that he assumed the leadership of civil society, he understood the importance of separating it from the role of parties or institutions: “It is fashionable to criticize politics. And, especially, politicians. But civil society cannot be a refuge for those disillusioned and disappointed in politics. If politics is not going well, it must be improved, regenerated. Civil society cannot replace it”.
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Bofill, Òmnium and Encyclopedia; education, culture and nation as pillars of the country. The seventh president of Òmnium Cultural was a good and simple man who has bequeathed to civil society two necessary political attitudes in his time and just as essential in 2023: discretion and generosity.
“Beyond those who only critically observe the weaknesses of our society, we propose to act to improve it.” Today President Porta has not left because Òmnium continues to make a compass of his legacy.