Volunteers repaired 10 homes in Lagoa and Castro Marim this summer
Lagoa and Castro Marim paid for the works and the charity Just a Change supplied the labour, with about 30 volunteers on the Castro Marim sites alone. In Funchal, where families were handed the money instead, the association paying it out says builders are expensive and hard to find.
Five families in Castro Marim, Odeleite, Junqueira and Montinho da Conveniência got their homes back at the end of August. About 30 volunteers had spent the previous weeks repairing them, among them university students, doctors, architects and engineers, as well as a group that had come over from Spain. The council’s social services chose the houses. The council also paid for the materials, the logistics and the waste removal, and it’s the second summer in a row that it has done so.
Lagoa did the same between 31 August and 12 September, paying €33,227.68 for work on five homes where 13 people live, seven adults and six children, according to the council. Faro has now hosted three of these camps, in 2021, 2025 and 2026, and the council counts 10 homes repaired across all three.
The volunteers come through Just a Change, a Lisbon charity founded in 2010. In these camps the council picks the families and funds the work, sometimes with other partners, while the charity brings coordinators, a site technician and volunteers who stay for about two weeks. Last year it repaired 139 private homes in 34 municipalities, its highest number so far, and spent €1.9 million on that work. It insulated 92 of them. In 2025, 15.6% of people in Portugal said they couldn’t afford to keep their home adequately warm, against 8.8% across the EU, according to Eurostat’s survey of living conditions.
In Funchal the help came as money. The Associação de Desenvolvimento de Santo António handed more than €100,000 to 40 families, 101 people in all, to repair their homes, DNOTICIAS reported on 9 October. Its president, Marcelo Gouveia, is reported as saying that demand is growing and that high labour costs and a shortage of skilled builders are holding the repairs back.
Volunteers don’t close that gap on their own. Just a Change’s annual report for 2025 says that during that summer’s camps it had to hire outside contractors to make sure the planned work got done. It also paid for its Minho operation from its own funds, because it couldn’t find a council there to back it. Apart from Eurostat’s, the figures here come from the councils and the charity.
Just a Change has no weekly programme in the Algarve. In Lisbon, Porto and Braga, it’s taking sign-ups for Turn Up, its weekday programme, for October and November. You pick one four-hour shift on a weekday morning or afternoon and return to the same site once a week for a month. It costs €5 for insurance, a T-shirt and tools. You need to be 18 or over, but you don’t need any building experience, since every team of five volunteers has its own coordinator and a site technician who leads the work. The charity says it gets more applications than places, so late sign-ups go on a waiting list.
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