Universidade Católica welcomes Spanish volunteers to international volunteer programme

Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Porto Campus, welcomed 32 Spanish volunteers as part of FLY, the international volunteering programme. In Porto, 2 projects were developed with 3 CASO partner institutions.

The "Porto de Esperança" project had 6 volunteers and was developed in partnership with Cáritas Diocesana do Porto, where the volunteers sorted, selected and organised clothes, took stock of shoes and computerised medicines. At Porta Solidária, volunteers helped to cook and serve meals, as well as cleaning the crockery and spaces. The "Porto with a future" project had four volunteers who took part in a fortnight of fun at the António Cândido Centre, where they carried out activities such as educational cooking, a swimming pool, mini-golf, a boat trip and lots of fun activities and inter-relational work.

In the words of volunteer Laura Velasco, a law and international relations student at Comillas Pontifical University: "My experience of volunteering at Caritas and Porta Solidaria was deeply enriching, both on a personal and human level. At Caritas, I worked organising clothes and medicines and helping families in vulnerable situations. At Porta Solidaria, we prepared food kits and served dinners to homeless people. Direct contact with realities very different from my own allowed me to see first-hand the harshness of poverty, but also the generosity and dignity of those who have very little. One particularly striking gesture was that of a man who, having nothing, wanted to give me his one euro as a token of his gratitude. Both organisations share the same mission: to help without judging and to treat everyone with equality and respect. I learnt that social inclusion depends as much on individual commitment as on community support, access to resources and the elimination of prejudice."

In Fornos de Algodres, Ansião, Estremoz, Sabrosa and Arraiolos, 22 volunteers are taking part in five housing rehabilitation work camps with Just a Change until the end of August.

The FLY programme, which reinforces the participating universities' commitment to sustainable development, aims above all to raise awareness among university communities of the problems of migration, refugees and people at risk of social exclusion, and to highlight projects that care for people and the community.  FLY is an international volunteering programme promoted by the Jesuit Universities of Spain: Comillas (Madrid), Deusto (Bilbao) and ESADE (Barcelona), Loyola (Andalusia), IQS (Barcelona) and the Portuguese Catholic University.