We work with communities to make them more supportive, resilient and healthy, by promoting quality of life and full citizenship. We help fight poverty by supporting solidarity and gift culture and by building neighbourly support networks where the ability to offer and receive help makes people stronger and more capable of facing their own challenges.
Our work is divided into various areas of intervention.
The Rediscovering community mission forms part of the People Goal and collaborates with Ufficio Pio, one of FCSP’s auxiliary bodies, to help improve the various aspects of people’s lives, by promoting individual resourcefulness and independence.
Healthy communities
Physical and mental health is essential to the quality of life of people and communities. That’s why we support projects that provide people in need of care with effective tools to enable them to enjoy full freedom of choice and self-determination. Many of these projects involve innovative approaches to the construction of life plans, with a particular focus on ensuring that the most vulnerable people have access to the most appropriate services.
As part of these efforts, we support local communities, which can play a central role in building inclusion, care practices and a new concept of collective welfare, by various means, including the strengthening of networks involving public institutions, the third sector and civil society. This is the focus of TransForm, an initiative developed by European and non-European foundations, aimed at formulating and facilitating an integrated, community-centric approach to care, by actively involving decision-makers, operators, intervention beneficiaries and citizens in an international forum.
Local communities, networking, inclusion and innovative care practices are also the key features of InTreCCCi, a call for proposals for initiatives aimed at helping at-risk people to carry on living in their homes. The rationale behind this call for proposals is to promote a concept of home care based on the social inclusion of vulnerable people in need of care, and support for family members and carers, in the community and across different aspects of life.
Neighbourly support networks, the culture of solidarity and local systems for combating poverty
Rediscovering community also means strengthening the social capital of communities, as a potential source of resources for groups or individuals to draw upon at times of difficulty. It can be achieved by initiatives that foster relationships and facilitate self-organisation, as a means of kick-starting neighbourly support networks and promoting locally organised coverage of social needs.
Initiatives of this type include Tavole Allegre, an experimental project aimed at bringing people together to share meals around shared tables, on a structured basis, to promote the formation of social networks through conviviality.
We strive to achieve the same aims by supporting Community Foundations. These philanthropic intermediaries have the leverage to mobilise civil society in a given geographical area and promote gift culture, thus strengthening social cohesion and enhancing quality of life in the communities they work with.
Collaboration between public and private actors, within the same community, is possible when there is a common vision of development, aimed at meeting the needs of vulnerable people, as shown by the Social Dentistry Coordination project.
These projects are significant, in our view, not only because they are effective, but also because they can be replicated in different places, by applying a tried and tested model, while tailoring it to individual contexts.
