Students of the UAB collaborate with the Platform of Citizens Affected by Mortgages (PAH)

Once a week since the beginning of September, Carla, Pere, Aina and Èlia go to the offices of the Platform of Citizens Affected by Mortgages (PAH), located in Camp de l'Arpa, to collaborate with them  through a volunteering program coordinated by Fundació Autònoma Solidària (FAS). This volunteering consists in offering support and individual attention to people affected by this situation, collecting data and completing a data base that allows a careful monitoring of the cases that the organization works on.

One of the students emphasizes the value of humane treatment and says that the PAH has managed to "connect with the people individually and restore this personal dimension that the media usually forget."

Mercè Piedemont, coordinator of the project, explains that volunteers are students of Social Anthropology because it is important that volunteering is not only carried out for an altruistic cause, but it also becomes a source of learning for the students."We thought that it could be interesting and rewarding in an anthropological level to observe the diversity of circumstances and conditions through direct contact with the people affected."

The Platform of Citizens Affected by Mortgages (PAH) works since 2009 in the context of the housing crisis. Two years ago they started working on collective bargaining and therefore they organized themselves in assemblies by banks. This way of organizing has allowed the increase of the number of people and, as a result, it was necessary to start a documentation process. This work, which has been developed in part by volunteers of the FAS, allows a continuous monitoring about the cases and preparing reports about the situation in Spain, such as the one from last November by the Observatory for Equality of the UAB, the Observatory for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (DESC) and the Platform of Citizens Affected by Mortgages (PAH).