To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the International Year of the Family sponsored by the United Nations, the UIC's Institute of Advanced Family Studies (IESF) will organize the 2nd Congress on Family and Society: The Family and Sustainable Development, which will be held on Wednesday and Thursday, 24-25 September 2014, on Barcelona campus. The congress is sponsored by the Santander IsFamily Chair, which was created with the support of the Bank of Santander's Global Universities Division and the Joaquim Molins Figueras Foundation.

The family will be the cross-cutting item in the different thematic topics at the congress: economics, health, education and family policies. Experts will discuss the political and business matters agreed on by the European Commission in 2005 to speed up achievement of the objectives of the International Conference in Beijing: the development of the measures necessary to care for the elderly, ill and disabled; the promotion of work schedule flexibility based on family needs; and access to public services that are more compatible with work schedules.

As stated by Dr. Montserrat Gas, the Director of the IESF, “In the current context of poverty, it is urgent for the debate to be reopened to determine which items on this "wish list" should be changed, what is feasible and what is not, and, above all, how preservation of the family should take precedence over companies, countries and other institutions".

The congress speakers will include outstanding academics such as James Arthur, a professor Education and the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom), Andrea Maccarini, a professor of Sociology at the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy), Bradford Wilcox, the Director of the National Marriage Project and an associate professor at the University of Virginia (United States), and Stefano Zamagni, a professor at the Università di Bologna (Italy), as well as social agents such as Stuart Duffin, the Director of Policies and Programmes at One Family (Ireland).

There will be eighty speakers at the congress from twenty-six different countries, including South Africa, Turkey, Canada, China, France, Portugal, Australia, Guatemala, Romania and Macedonia.