The Covid crisis came scything through Alejandro’s* life with a speed, ferocity and vindictive thoroughness that stuns him to this day. Almost overnight, the widowed craftsman’s business supplying leather pieces to shops, markets and the military folded, his meagre savings gave out, his father died from coronavirus, the electricity was cut off and he found himself relying on food banks to feed himself and his teenage daughter.
“Things were hard before the pandemic,” he says. “But if you’d told me one day that everything that’s happened to me would happen to me, I’d never have believed you.”
“I started skipping meals so that I could feed my daughter properly. “I lost 12 kilos through nerves, not eating and not sleeping. I used to lie and tell her I wasn’t hungry because I’d been picking at stuff all day.”
By spring last year, Alejandro was begging outside a Madrid supermarket just to survive. He would probably still be there now if it hadn’t been for a family he had got to know at the supermarket – and an unusually altruistic harnessing of social media.
The family’s daughter told him about Un Mismo Equipo (One Team), an Instagram account and website that allows unemployed and often homeless people to advertise their skills to potential employers. A company that makes luxury motorbike seats came across Alejandro’s profile and offered him a job at their factory in northern Spain.
The initiative began in June when a friend of the filmmaker Gonzalo Perales sent him a photo of a...
Read Full Story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/15/a-more-human-kind-of-linkedin-the-spanish-project-using-social-media-to-help-covid-unemployed
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