05.2 TO O L B OX FO R ADVOCACY
I. EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS
WHAT IS AUTOGESTÃO?
The successful passage of policy takes time and often hinges on widespread and vocal public support. In practice, this means the public must be educated on and inspired by relevant issues. In order to support UNMP’s drafted selfmanagement bill, the team sought to increase public understanding of three main topics: the housing deficit in Brazil, autogestão, and collective property. To that end, we researched, synthesized, and developed three educational flyers in order to share information in a digestible and visually appealing manner. These flyers are included on the website, and are also downloadable so that they can be easily printed and distributed as part of a tri-fold brochure, which has a QR code to link people back to the website. A brief description of each of the three flyers is included below, with copies of the flyers to follow.
This flyer outlines the underlying principles and key values of autogestão housing and what it looks like in practice: self management by and for residents. It highlights the failure of the for-profit market to provide adequate housing for much of Brazil’s low-income population, and details how autogestão has proven successful in providing higher quality and more affordable housing. It stresses the need for stable legislation at the national level to provide permanent programmatic and financial support for autogestão housing, enabling it to scale up and continue to fill the gaps left by the for-profit market.
UNDERSTANDING THE HOUSING DEFICIT
CLICK
Highlighting the severity of the housing crisis in Brazil, this flyer details the growing deficit and the crisis’s particularly harsh impact on low-income families. It also points to the factors contributing to the crisis: the commodification of housing, the speculative land market, developers’ profit motives, and the failure of the government to provide its citizens with their constitutionally guaranteed right to housing. The flyer notes how the housing crisis impacts other sectors, including health, education, and the economy, and advocates for the support of UNMP’s proposed self-management bill as a means to begin redressing this severe housing crisis.
86 • SUPPORTING THE BILL
COLLECTIVE PROPERTY The collective property flyer provides a description of collective property structures and seeks to normalize this form of ownership, detailing its widespread and lengthy adoption by societies all over the world. The flyer also works to dispel common myths about collective property and discusses its importance in the wake of the severe housing crisis caused by profit-motivated developers in Brazil. The team hopes that these flyers will provide the information necessary to educate and inspire action among website visitors, and to demonstrate an optimistic alternative to the normalized structure of exploitative, for-profit housing development.
