Yes, It’s Possible: A Handbook for Building Power from Below book launch and discussion
w/João França, Julieta Lechini, and Juanjo Ramón from the PAH and special guests: Rob Robinson, Kazembe Balagun, Zara Cadoux (Crown Heights Tenant Union), and Silvia Federici
A handbook for achieving social change through collective action based on lessons from a revolutionary movement’s struggle for housing justice in Spain.
Founded in Spain in 2009 as an immediate response to the devastating effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca – PAH) has since grown into a nationwide movement with over two hundred local chapters. Together, they have stopped thousands of evictions, negotiated with banks, forced legislative change, occupied fifty buildings, and, most importantly, rescued thousands of people from the edge of the abyss. It achieved all of this without backing from any party, union, or major NGO, and without full-time staff or external funding.
Please join us as housing organizers from Spain and the US share their strategies, tactics, and lessons learned in more than a decade-and-a-half worth of experience in social movement and community organizing. The lessons offered here, ranging from how to run a citizens’ assembly and manage conflicts to reflections on negotiation tactics, street-level organizing, and collective care, are drawn from the PAH’s struggle for housing justice, but can be useful for groups of citizens fighting collectively anywhere in the world. The PAH’s message to the world? “Only by organizing in the streets can we force legislative change, and only through legislative change can we gain more rights.”
João França (Brasília, 1990) is a researcher and journalist based in Barcelona. His work is focused on social movements and collective action, and his projects have been devoted to subjects such as the right to housing and the right to the city, queer history, migrants’ rights, collective memory, and the challenges posed by disinformation. He is currently working at the Social Anthropology department at the University of Barcelona, where he is developing a dissertation on coalitions and alliances within social movements. He is involved in different movements and organizations, and since 2023, he has also served as the president of the Progressive Summer University of Catalonia (UPEC).
The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de los Afectados por la Hipoteca–PAH) is an assembly-based housing justice movement established in Barcelona in early 2009 in response to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent housing crisis in Spain. In 2013, PAH received the Premio Nacional de Derechos Humanos, a national human rights award, and the European Citizens' Prize.
Silvia Federici is a long-time feminist, writer, and teacher living in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent book is Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions/PM Press, 2012). Born in Italy, Federici has lectured and taught widely in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the U.S. She has participated in numerous international movements and social struggles, including feminist, education, anti-death penalty, as well as anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements.