Our project “Futuro Presente / Future Present” represents a significant support for dozens of Italian mothers-girls, foreign women with children and unaccompanied foreign minors, both to cope with the emergencies of the everyday than to work on one’s own social inclusion.
The aim of “Futuro Presente / Future Present” is to help vulnerable people to whom the state fails to offer immediate and/or adequate responses. The people identified and included in our project, based on the criterion of being most vulnerable, are almost all girls, women or minors.
The women assisted by us, are most of them in conditions of relative or absolute poverty. Some have no qualifications or are in possession of degrees not recognised in Italy. Many of them do not speak Italian and therefore find it difficult to relate to each other and find employment. Generally, the women included in the project, Italian or foreign, are alone: young single mothers, victims of violence with sons/daughters, mothers of minors with even very severe disabilities.
The minors we support are both Unaccompanied Foreign Minors (MSNA) and children and adolescents belonging to families, often single parents, affected by serious illnesses or disabilities.
A network to respond to state deficiencies
In general, “Futuro Presente / Future Present” represents the opportunity to complete the chain of services provided to vulnerable people, especially with regard to the professional orientation, capacity-building, the acquisition of professionalising skills and job inclusion.
This is the essence of the project Livia Maurizi, Head of Programmes for NOVE: “Futuro Presente addresses some of the state’s shortcomings by offering a range of supplementary services. It works in a network with other organisations to ensure comprehensive and synergetic support for the users involved”:
The project, in fact, is implemented by NOVE Caring Humans in cooperation with Third Sector organisations, Social Cooperatives running Reception Facilities, municipal social services, Area Social Plans and parishes.
Collaboration and exchange enable the realisation of highly focused interventions, where each subject has a specific role and tasks, adapted to the skills of each one.
The philosophy behind the methodological approach of ‘Futuro Presente’ is embedded in the concepts of complementarity and integration. Instead of a decisive intervention from above, ad hoc answers to their needs are designed together with the beneficiaries and implemented in quick times. This approach gives them the opportunity to acquire new tools that are crucial for their social inclusion and economic and working autonomy.
Enhancing everyone’s resources
The intervention logic that is applied is always that of the “maximum valorisation of everyone’s resources: the people included in the project, the local sending and implementing actors“, explains Rosanna Pricoco, coordinator of “Futuro Presente”, adding: “Our conviction is in fact that only by operating in a systemic manner can we respond concretely to real needs, obtaining effective and lasting results“. In the social sphere, in fact, the focus is on sustainability so that the benefits continue after the end of the interventions.
In this prospective, ‘Futuro Presente’ stands, in some cases, as a “the missing opportunity“, the useful piece to go beyond an almost exclusively educational or, sometimes, merely welfare connotation.
For some local partners, “Futuro Presente” represented an opportunity to “see people” about which they take care “with different eyes“, because within the project, they showed aspects and potential never previously highlighted.
The project “Futuro Presente” is realised thanks to the financial support of KPMG Foundation and theM5s Restitution Committee.
Photo Credits Virginio Favale