PAH-Barcelona
The Platform for Mortgage Affected People demonstrates a very specific, successful and mixed form of social innovation that, though it is headquartered in Sants, has not emerged out of Sants’ grassroots activism. In this case, the PAH’s leadership practices are especially important for understanding how and why the platform succeeded in having a huge social impact. They combine both contentious and conventional actions. Thus, at the same time as resisting systemic problems (such as stopping evictions or contesting public policies), they try to get influence to the system proposing alternative public policies and legal reforms, and they also produce dissident responses to the failure of authorities to address the problem, such as negotiating with financial institutions to prevent evictions or occupying empty buildings owned by banks to make them available to evicted families. Download report