WHAT WE DO
LOCAL COMMUNITY
Deeply rooted in the territories in which we operate and in constant dialogue to grasp their needs and help build responses, we have made available to the community the experience gained in working with fragility. This has led to the creation of services that respond to the wellbeing and care needs of families: early childhood services, specialised centres to support the person and the family, recreational services and services for reconciling family and work, study support, summer centres or holiday stays, and Family Centre.
WOMEN
Women’s projects and services aim to promote the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls (Goal 5 of UN Agenda 2030). Working on resources, encouraging autonomy, helping women to recognise their ability to choose for themselves and their children, to redefine their family, work and housing projects. We welcome women and girls coming out of situations of violence and ill-treatment or in temporary difficulty in our shelter homes, in parent-child communities, in flats for the start of autonomy, in social housing projects. We activate territorial and home-based educational paths to accompany them to autonomy, job placement, to support motherhood, from pregnancy, in situations of particular fragility and poverty of the family, friendship and social support network.
MINORS AND FAMILIES
Every child has the right to live in a family. They have the right to be welcomed, protected, they have the right to care, space and time to express themselves and their potential. This is why it is essential to support parenting and families, whatever form they may take, whether they are fragile or just eager to grow as an active part of their community. The cooperative was set up to welcome minors temporarily removed from their families in educational communities, and works to accompany vulnerable children and young people through educational projects in schools, at home, in day care communities, in youth centres, and in family fostering projects.
YOUNG PEOPLE
As the children and young people we take in grow up, it becomes urgent for us to provide them with all possible tools to face adult life and become autonomous and independent. Young people need existential growth, rootedness in their territory, expectations of recognition. We welcome young people who have just reached the age of majority in autonomy start-up and social housing projects, we accompany them with individualised educational projects, we create opportunities to meet in adolescent spaces and youth centres. We try to foster opportunities for socialisation and protagonism, to create educational and training opportunities.
MIGRANTS
We have been welcoming migrants since 2001. Today, as then, we have not chosen to ‘deal with a phenomenon’, but to put people and their rights at the centre of our projects. Thus we have built around them a welcoming context, a fabric of bonds of familiarity and proximity, so that in our small communities they can feel at home and be living, active protagonists of the places where they find themselves. Within our projects we welcome and accompany to inclusion and activation: holders of international protection, victims of trafficking and migrant minors on their own.
WHO WE ARE
The cooperative is made up of people who are related to each other: who work together, who share, who support each other, who work for the common good. People who have chosen which side to be on: that of the most fragile and the least advantaged, to share their problems and to try, with them, to overcome them positively.
Through our work we want to promote a society of solidarity, seeking confrontation and sharing in the planning and management of services, initiating processes of social and community action capable of overcoming and preventing marginalisation, separation, isolation in order to guarantee rights.
Being members of the Cooperative therefore means producing a social history, an identity of intentions and concrete and verifiable social values. We want to support a culture of social solidarity, which enriches the realities and contexts in which it confronts and operates, which gives a voice to those who do not have one, which acts on the territory by promoting active citizenship.
We aim to build real opportunities for those who experience situations of difficulty, discomfort, fragility, not to make them ‘assisted subjects’ on whom to intervene, but protagonists in the positive transformation of social relations.
The cooperative expresses qualified socio-pedagogical action: the ability to prevent, to promote, to cure, to accompany, to make autonomous. We therefore activate paths of participation and communication not only as a strategy of efficiency, but above all as a choice of relational quality. The cooperative enhances its interventions and concrete experiences through rigorous professionalism and continuous verification of results; in the educational spaces it promotes the growth of relational capacity and a dimension of intense and affectively rich communication. Our socio-pedagogical heritage is based on being a community within ourselves and being a community to the outside world. We are a bearer of culture, proposing in-depth study, confrontation, study so that there is an ever greater understanding of social phenomena and forms of vulnerability, also for the purpose of continually redefining our work practices.
La Grande Casa builds and disseminates social solidarity projects, seeks alliances, identifies and proposes responses, deploying human and economic resources, appealing to institutions and the territory, and also proposing itself as a political and advocacy actor. The cooperative does not intend to develop a policy based on the interests of its own organisational system, but a social policy capable of safeguarding people’s quality of life in all spheres, which is expressed through a precise legislative and social policy system competence, an active participation in institutional venues, and a serious and authoritative operational presence in the territory. Only in this way is it possible to read the needs of the weakest subjects and, starting from these, build social planning and adequate responses.
The cooperative acts in a network by comparing, coordinating and operating with other experiences and skills recognised as complementary. The cooperative is a social enterprise that promotes and develops innovative aspects within the cooperative culture, keeping in mind the dimension of economy and production, considering quality, social balance sheet, social impact assessment and the conjugation of efficiency and solidarity as the cornerstones of its social work system. High is the level of professional skills, contractuality, structural and management standards, and the complexity of the organisational system. Being a social enterprise, it needs a rigorous planning activity, an organisational system capable of consolidating group ethics, a training system and consultancy capable of making it a leading.
