EVA Counselling Center Helps Indebted People
Are you being troubled with debts? EVA Counselling Center (organization working alongside the Diocesan Charity in České Budějovice) provides a long-term system of help with over-indebtedness to women and their families which have financial problems – in other words, when they are no longer able to redeem their obligations. Over-indebtedness is a burden for the whole family and poses the risk of possible loss of their home, and it also threatens the whole stability of the family. No need to mention the negative impact it has on children living in indebted families.
This year, Eva Counselling Center organizes “The Debt Trap Help Project”. This project is being realized thanks to the financial help of the City Authority of České Budějovice. Social workers offer their clients help with arranging the meetings with their creditors, with negotiating the payment schedules and they also help them with the documents (explaining their content, composing of the documents, completing the forms). They can accompany their clients, whom they also provide with assistance in dealings with their debts, as well as with checking their possibilities of how to get them rid of their debts. All the services are provided for free. Our social workers have long-term experience in this field, and they endeavour to utilize this experience in the Centre´s activities and future projects.
It is an erroneous assumption that over-indebtedness of households has nothing to do with us. On one hand the critical indebtedness may contribute to a development of other pathological phenomena within society, and it is also important to realize that it is us, the taxpayers, who then share the burden of paying off these debts. It is possible in the Czech Republic to levy execution even on a retirement pension as well as on some social benefits. Thus, it is again erroneous to assume that the debts belong only to the debtors, and that they are paid off only by them. Moreover, it is important to realize that the debt recovery is quite profitable, and is not always only about exercising the law and justice. It can happen that there might be debtors “made on purpose”, whose debts are then intentionally increased, because as their debts rise, so do the incomes of those who collect these debts.
This is the reason why activities concentrating on systematic dealing with destructive indebtedness have been arising over the past few years in the Czech Republic. Activities of Alliance Against Debts, which is a professional platform dealing with prevention and minimization of risks connected with over-indebtedness, are one of them. This Alliance was founded by experts from both the non-profit and state-funded organizations in 2011. Their representatives met at the Ministry of the interior of the Czech Republic and decided to found a professional platform – the Alliance Against Debts.
One of the goals of the Alliance is to improve the financial literacy of people. They also endeavour to create a debt consultancy network in the Czech Republic, as well as they seek to regulate granting of consumer credits. They pay attention to alternative ways of debt relief in cases where it is impossible to declare a personal bankruptcy, and they points to the need to change the system of debt collection, too. The Alliance tries to communicate with the lawmakers in an attempt to point out that the situation in the indebted Czech households requires systematic solution which would be enshrined in the legislation, too, in order to prevent further growth of social and economic problems.
Contact:
Lucie Kolářová, Head of the Eva Counselling Center
