Arnaldo Machado, President of the Administrative Commission of the São Miguel Branch of the Portuguese Red Cross, warns of a consistent rise in requests for help with rent, mortgages, electricity, water and food—and of a new social reality in which even employed families can find themselves unable to afford the essentials of daily life
Poverty does not always announce itself dramatically. Sometimes it arrives quietly, concealed behind a salary deposited at the end of the month, an apartment whose rent has become impossible to reconcile with household income, an electricity bill postponed until the next paycheck, or a shopping basket from which another item must be removed. It can inhabit a home in which one or even two adults work every day and yet discover, after housing and essential expenses have been paid, that employment itself is no longer sufficient protection against hardship.
This is one of the most troubling realities emerging from an extensive interview with Arnaldo Machado, President of the Administrative Commission of the São Miguel Branch of the Portuguese Red Cross, conducted by Rui Leite Melo for Diário dos Açores. His portrait of contemporary vulnerability on the island is not simply one of traditional poverty. It is a portrait of social fragility moving into households that might once have believed themselves protected by work, regular income and ordinary economic stability.
Machado describes a “consistent increase in requests for help with basic survival expenses”—rent, mortgage payments, electricity, water and food. More significantly, he identifies among the emerging profiles of vulnerability households with one or two employed members, frequently earning the regional minimum wage, whose net income is effectively consumed by housing and other essential goods.
That distinction matters.
For much of the modern welfare state, employment has been imagined as the principal bridge out of poverty. The person who worked might struggle, but work was expected to provide some measure of economic security. When families in which one or two people are employed nevertheless require humanitarian assistance to meet basic expenses, the problem is no longer located simply at the margins of the economy. It has entered the economy itself.
And behind every statistic is the intimate arithmetic of survival: what can be paid this month, what must wait, what can be reduced, and what cannot be eliminated at all.
An Archipelago of Unequal Vulnerabilities
The Red Cross’s concerns extend beyond material deprivation. Machado identifies poverty and social exclusion, homelessness, insufficient household income and the isolation of older people among the principal challenges confronting São Miguel.
The greatest concentration of requests for assistance received by the São Miguel branch comes from the municipality of Ponta Delgada.
Yet the interview also exposes a difficulty particular to island societies: humanitarian needs are regional, while institutional resources are geographically uneven. The Portuguese Red Cross currently maintains active structures in the Azores only on São Miguel and Terceira. Its permanent capacity is therefore not uniform across the nine islands.
Should a regional emergency occur, Machado emphasizes, available Red Cross resources throughout the Region—and, when necessary, resources from mainland Portugal—can be mobilized. But everyday social vulnerability is different from catastrophe. It accumulates slowly, house by house and parish by parish, and requires the less visible infrastructure of proximity: social workers, psychologists, volunteers, transportation, local partnerships and people who know where fragility is hiding.
This is one of the peculiar contradictions of an archipelago. Distance can be beautiful on a map and unforgiving in social policy. Nine islands mean nine territories in which aging, poverty, access to healthcare, family support and emergency preparedness assume different dimensions.
Solidarity, in an archipelago, must therefore learn geography.
The Loneliness Behind the Door
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the aging of the Azorean population.
Machado points to an accelerating aging process and a growing number of older people experiencing geographical and social isolation, frequently with limited family support. Emigration has contributed to that reality, as have the demands of contemporary employment, which can leave families with less time and fewer resources to provide continuous care.
There is a particular kind of vulnerability in growing old alone on an island. It may not appear in emergency statistics. It exists instead in hours—the long hours between one human voice and another, between a visit and the next visit, between the moment someone falls and the moment someone realizes that something has happened.
The Red Cross’s Teleassistance service operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, providing assistance in situations such as falls or panic and allowing older residents greater security in their own homes. Machado says the service has prospects for expansion, with municipalities demonstrating increasing concern and acquiring more teleassistance equipment for their populations.
Technology here performs an important function, but its deeper purpose is profoundly human: to make solitude less dangerous.
The São Miguel branch also operates a Mobile Cognitive Stimulation Project, developed by its psychology department in community centers, day centers, and residential facilities for older people in Ponta Delgada. The objective is both neurological and social—to slow cognitive decline while combating chronic loneliness.
Funded by the Municipality of Ponta Delgada, the initiative is one the Red Cross would like to see extended through partnerships with other municipalities. Such expansion, however, will depend upon local interest and increased Regional Government support for the necessary human and logistical resources.
The significance of programs like these extends beyond institutional care. They raise a larger question increasingly unavoidable in the Azores: how does an aging archipelago allow people not merely to live longer, but to remain connected to life?
Safety matters. Cognitive health matters. But so do conversation, recognition, companionship and the reassurance of knowing that one’s existence remains visible to others.
Preparing for the Day the Island Needs Everyone
If poverty and aging constitute slow-moving emergencies, the geography and geology of the Azores carry the possibility of emergencies that arrive suddenly.
Earthquakes, volcanic activity, landslides, floods, severe weather and temporary isolation between islands belong to the historical and physical reality of the archipelago. For São Miguel, the Red Cross has therefore made establishing an Emergency Hub one of its strategic priorities for 2026.
Machado argues that the case for such a facility is self-evident. São Miguel is the archipelago’s largest island by population and geographical area and receives substantial numbers of visitors. Its terrain also creates landslide risks, while the possibility of seismic, volcanic or other natural emergencies can never be entirely removed from consideration.
Efforts are underway to create a logistics center supporting the Emergency Hub, which Machado believes can be completed by the end of 2026. The planned location is outside central Ponta Delgada, near a strategic road junction, allowing rapid access to all municipalities on the island.
The importance of preparation became unmistakably clear during the crisis caused by the 2024 fire at Hospital do Divino Espírito Santo. Machado recalls that, through cooperation between the São Miguel and Angra do Heroísmo branches of the Portuguese Red Cross, they installed an Advanced Medical Post in Ponta Delgada in less than 24 hours.
There are moments when institutional preparedness becomes almost invisible because it works. Equipment arrives. People know what to do. Logistics become medicine. Hours saved become suffering prevented.
The lesson of such emergencies is that resilience cannot be improvised after disaster has already begun.
Following the creation of the São Miguel Emergency Hub, the branch also intends to develop its capacity to participate in non-emergency patient transportation, within the framework of the regional regulations on land transport of patients published earlier this year.
Health Beyond the Hospital
The interview also widens the definition of humanitarian need.
Mental health, loneliness, addiction and domestic violence cross generations and social classes, and Machado indicates that the São Miguel branch is seeking to broaden its healthcare response. A licensing process is underway with the Regional Directorate for Health for medical consulting rooms in several specialties, intended to address gaps in access to the public system and provide services closer to the community.
The underlying philosophy is important. Human vulnerability rarely arrives neatly divided into administrative categories. Economic distress can become psychological distress. Isolation can intensify declining health. Housing insecurity can destabilize families. Aging can produce both medical and social needs. A person seeking food assistance may also require psychological support, legal guidance, healthcare or simply someone capable of directing them toward the institution that can help.
For that reason, Machado emphasizes the Red Cross’s work in networks and partnerships. After receiving and assessing people seeking assistance, the São Miguel branch directs cases toward the competent organizations, attempting to ensure that no person who comes to the Red Cross is left without a response.
There is humility in that model. No institution can solve poverty alone. What matters is that the person standing before it does not become lost between institutional doors.
The Human Infrastructure of Solidarity
Behind all these responses stand volunteers.
Machado describes volunteerism as perhaps the Red Cross’s most valuable asset. The São Miguel branch combines a permanent technical staff—including professionals in social services, psychology and administration—with an active volunteer corps working across general, social and emergency activities.
Recruitment remains difficult. The contemporary voluntary sector competes for a finite resource that cannot be purchased in the conventional sense: people’s time.
The Red Cross is therefore seeking partnerships capable of bringing specialized skills into its volunteer network. One avenue Machado identifies is cooperation with the University of the Azores, particularly involving students in Nursing, Medicine, Social Work, Civil Protection, and related fields.
Volunteers receive initial and specialized Red Cross training, followed by periodic instruction in areas including first aid, psychosocial support and emergency management. The objective is not merely to recruit volunteers but to retain them by giving their service structure, knowledge and purpose.
This, too, deserves attention. Communities are not resilient simply because they possess institutions. They are resilient because enough people continue to believe that another person’s emergency concerns them.
The Price of Survival—and the Value of Presence
For 2026 and 2027, the São Miguel branch has outlined initiatives across social intervention, health, emergency response, volunteerism and training. Their implementation, Machado cautions, requires financial sustainability, and some projects will only be possible with support from the Regional Government, municipalities and other entities.
The branch is simultaneously seeking a closer relationship with the community, through public events, social media, partnerships and membership. Machado appeals for more people to become members of the São Miguel Red Cross, noting that the membership contribution is only two euros per month but collectively helps sustain the organization’s humanitarian work.
Yet perhaps the most important message emerging from the interview cannot be expressed in the language of institutional planning.
It lies instead in the sentence about people asking for help with rent, mortgage payments, electricity, water and food.
These are not luxuries. They are the elementary architecture of an ordinary life: a roof, light, water, something to eat. When working households begin requiring assistance to maintain that architecture, society is receiving a warning that should not be dismissed as an isolated problem affecting an unfortunate few.
At the same time, another Azorean may be living alone, hoping not to fall before someone calls. Somewhere else, a family may be navigating illness without sufficient support. A volunteer may be learning emergency procedures for a disaster everyone hopes will never happen. And somewhere in São Miguel, plans are being drawn for a logistics center whose true value will only become visible on the day when minutes matter.
The Red Cross exists within all these different versions of vulnerability because humanitarian work begins with a deceptively simple proposition: the suffering of another human being cannot be treated as somebody else’s problem.
For the Azores, that principle acquires particular resonance. Islands teach both separation and dependence. The sea divides communities, but it also reminds them how necessary bridges are. In societies shaped by emigration, aging populations and geographical distance, solidarity cannot remain merely a beautiful word invoked in moments of catastrophe. It must become infrastructure—social, institutional and profoundly human.
And perhaps the most disturbing poverty is not measured only by what a person lacks in the bank.
It begins when someone can no longer afford the essentials despite working; when an elderly person becomes invisible behind a closed door; when illness encounters distance; or when a person asks for help and discovers there is nowhere left to turn.
The measure of a humane society is not whether vulnerability exists. It always will.
The measure is whether, when someone finally reaches out, there is still a hand on the other side.
Based on an interview by journalist Rui Leite Melo in Diário dos Açores, Paulo Vivieiros, director. Photos from DA.