Trayectory
Vital Timeline of Maria Jose Anitua Trevijano, since she was in her mother's belly, connected to housing.
Trayectory
MJASL is the social enterprise which supports EHC and, its trajectory, is the personal trajectory of Maria Jose Anitua, a passionately curious person who has been aware of her need to work as part of a multidisciplinary team since she began to take her first professional child through Consorcio America.
This Social Enterprise was the origin of her first professional office, today called AyL Bufete Jurídico y Tributario, specialized in real state (tax and contracts), with international projection despite being a small local office.
But first, let’s get to know Maria Jose a little better…
At the age of four, she remembers sticking a hairclip into a socket to see what would happen… Afterall, she was lucky and the stock probably had a positive effect on her life and personality. Today, she has an enormous life force. In the TAX Administration, they called her the Atomic Ant.
At the age of 14, she had already decided to become a lawyer to help others (her fiends’ mothers told her she was good at it, when she negotiated at that age to get her friends to come to her house fo a sleepover).
When she finished law degree (at the age of 21), she decided that she wanted to dedicate herself to the human side of law, with Fernando Buesa, a precursor of collaborative law, as explained in this video of the 20th anniversary of his assassination by ETA.
At the age of 22, when her father died (being the eldest of six siblings), she started negotiating rentals online (at that time it was simply by phone). In 2021, in an online presence course, with Arawana Hayashi, (MIT), she understood because that negotiation worked really fine for her and her family.
She was involved (30 years and pregnant of her first biological daughter), in her first important public-private real estate negotiation for the sale of the Teatro Principal. She did so as a member of the board of Vitoriana de Espectáculos (the first woman on this Board) in a very traditional company, where she became Vice-President in just a few years, an experience with her now dear friend José Angel Cuerda( 20 year Vitoria- Gasteiz Maire).
Intuition has been one of her strengths. In 2023 has understood that this intuition comes from innocence, understood as connection with spirituality like a child.
In 2006, as specialist in contracts and taxes in the real state sector and by listening to her intuition, proposed to reorganize her business AYL, accompanying their AYL clients of real estate sector to the Eastern Countries in anticipation of the burbule ‘s real estate. She helped setting up AYL Poland (a Real Estate international experience). This experience (with an office in Krakow) lasted for MJASL more than 10 years.
The learning from that failure has being crutial in EHC. It is clear that the international expansion of the project will be done through network with b2b local collaborations, although there are some key global collaborators.
Her life changed a lot in 2012, (looked like a revoluiton when it was a true evolution) when she discovered collaborative law on the Internet.
It has been thanks to an innovation project on empty commercial spaces, HIRI SPACE, developed collaborating with two clients of her former law firm, (SLK Group and Prisma Global) and also with INNOBASQUE. As can be seen on this video: VIDEO HIRI SPACE 1
She co-founded the ADCE (Basque Collaborative Law Association) in 2013, after training in France. Two years later, she got invited to participate in a conference at the Paris Bar Association thanks to the innovative way she was promoting it.
Link Colloque AFPDC 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMhUhVx3be8&t=81s
María José felt like an odd duck, very misunderstood by her environment, until she was given the book “The 100 Year Life” (by authors from the London Business School). At that moment she understood that what she was doing made perfect sense, in the Anglo-Saxon world, living a life in stages. At the age of 52, she found herself in one of those stages, giving purpose to her life by having found what she had been looking for all her life.
Her biological children were already grown up, she had good social capital (economic and human), the result of hard work (saved up like a good atomic ant). It was time to give back to society what she had received with the knowledge she had acquired. Her time had come, now she could focus on people through the creativity she had always been passionate about.
Most entrepreneurs who develop transformational leadership have had «hard experience» that drives them as change agents.
In the case of Maria Jose Anitua, the origin is in 2007. She found herself in the need to leave her home. She bought a new home to move in with her children within a month (there was practically no rental offer, in the middle of the real estate bubble). This house, once divided into 2 in 2016, has given rise to a pilot project. Although in that real estate operation guessed lost a lot of money , (she was aware of that risk at the time), this loss has brought the development of this pilot experience as a gain.
The rental of her «home» was a nightmarish experience that lasted about a year. Despite having a seemingly ironclad contract, with a deposit of 13,000 euros (year 2007), the tenants trashed her house. She witnessed during the year because she had the right to visit her loved and renovated home and, despite warning them, they continued to vandalize it. The negotiation for the return of the deposit was a real martyrdom. Fully aware of the risk of ending up in court, she returned part of the deposit. It should not have been returned, as hidden defects continued to appear (e.g., humidity in the new carpet that appeared after).
Since then, the promoter of Empty Homes Collaborative (EHC) project fully understands and empathizes with empty home owners. Recently in July 2022, a judgement in appel confirms that our system leaves the homeowner totally helpless and powerless.
The following paradox occurs: the solution is the problem. The current legal system protects the tenantes and at the same time is being turned against them. It causes a shortage of rental housing supply, which is totally understandable.
This is a global systemic problem that is reaching alarming levels. Only within the European Union there are 31,000,000 empty houses and a very high level of litigation, as can be confirmed by Juan Mora-Sanguinetti’s new book, “La factura de la injusticia”.
When organizing in 2018, from the Collaborative Law Association of the Basque Country and as president, the congress on conscious contracts, in collaboration with the City Council of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the protagonist of this story had at that time a house that had been empty for more than a year and a half. The house had recently been refurbished. Maria Jose Anitua fearfully ruled out several potential tenants.
When he received the proposal from the Vitoria City Council to test conscious contracts with refugees, she decided to experiment (as a guinea pig) with her own home. From this first very positive experience in collaboration with ACCEM, the pilot project was born through the Arteale Foundation (has a sandbox), already established in 2017.
Since then, with a vocation and a firm commitment to innovation (after developing the Innova agenda in 2008), thanks to her extensive experience in real estate and collaborative law (applying the lean and agile methodology), the «Empty Homes Collaborative» project was born. It began to optimize the Conscious Collaboration accords based on Collaborative Law to generate trust and offer maximum guarantees (economic and social) to the interested parties. The aim is to promote a Circular Economy model around empty houses.
Take a look at the testimonies
of people who have worked with Maria Jose, during her presidency at the Collaborative Law Association of Euskadi (ADCE) .
During our trip to Scotland, we discovered that we are a Camel startup. To our CEO’s arboreal mind (with the neural connections typical of ants), upon discovery, the word was puzzle. You can see the reflections on the blog.
The road travelled and the road that remained to be travelled made perfect sense with this camel trekking perspective.
This journey has meant a great personal change for many of the people who have participated in the project.
As Gandhi said, and Socrates said before him. «If you want to change the world, change yourself”.
One of the core values for which we collaborate in this project is Equal Justice. Surprisingly for me, the wound of injustice is a wound that I inherited from my family and that I am now learning to heal.
My father, who was a lawyer, though not a practising one, had the same concern. He was his own lawyer in a lawsuit over a noise problem, more than 10 years of litigation against the bar below the house and the Vitoria City Council. In my opinion, this was the trigger for the brain tumour from which he died at the age of 55, leaving six children, the youngest of whom was not yet a year old.
I have been able to see later on when I started working in Collaborative Law that there are many people who become ill due to the conflict.
I remember one person for whom I have deactivated a provision of funds and to whom I have returned it because in trying to manage the conflict I become ill again.
We are learning that if we change ourselves, even if apparently nothing changes, in reality everything changes. We have to be an example of the change we want to see in the world.
One of the greatest treasures I have found thanks to EHC is an Eritrean mother and her baby girl who was nine months old when we started living together in July 2022.
The Gandhi watercolour
The Gandhi watercolour was given to me by the artist. Uniting law and art were the root of the creation of the Arteale Foundation.
This union continues to accompany us on the camel’s path.
