Holistic ecology and educational poverty

Holistic ecology for children’s rights is a project dedicated to combating educational poverty. The objective is to eliminate neonatal poverty in the selected territories by acting on the various aspects that affect the first 1,000 days of a child's life, considered from the first day of pregnancy to the second year of age. The project focuses its action on Messina and Brescia, two communities that are very different from each other in terms of their socio-economic characteristics.

The chosen motto, Crescendo in Bellezza (Growing in beauty), testifies to the project's commitment to the objectives and priorities of the European Pillar of Civil Rights, according to which "Children have the right to affordable, good quality early childhood education and care" and "Children have the right to be protected from poverty. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds have the right to specific measures to promote equal opportunities".

The project involves Fondazione Comunità di Messina (as lead partner), Fondazione Comunità Bresciana, CAUTO Cooperative, CEVAS, the Municipality of Brescia, the Municipality of Messina, Assifero and Reves and involves numerous local, national and international partners. Ecologia Integrale per i Diritti dell'Infanzia (Holistic Ecology for the Rights of the Child) is a project that has been selected and supported by the Impresa Sociale Con I Bambini within the framework of the Fondo per il contrasto della povertà educativa minorile (Fund for the fight against juvenile educational poverty).

The project

Ecologia Integrale per i Diritti dell'Infanzia (Holistic Ecology for the Rights of the Child), a unique and highly innovative project, has three levels of action:

1 - Universal level, which aims to promote the health and early cognitive development of all those born in the reference territories. At the time of birth, operators in the community carry out so-called "home visits", bringing the families of new-born babies the greetings of the community, informing parents of the importance of certain choices to lay the foundations for the child's healthy growth and promoting reading aloud and listening to music. A further objective of this phase is to identify the weakest and most difficult subjects to be taken care of later on.

2 - Community level, which aims to develop socio-economic systems capable of generating alternatives in the main areas of human functioning of infants and their families (housing, work, knowledge, socialisation). In particular, participatory spaces of educational empowerment and actions to support housing and solidarity-based entrepreneurship are organised, capable of fostering the housing and work inclusion of the beneficiaries.

3 - Personalised level, which aims to study and develop custom projects in response to the needs and requirements of the individuals previously identified during home visits. And it is precisely in this last level that the most innovative element of the project is implemented: the capacity of personal capital (capitale personale di capacitazione, CPC). After signing a shared social pact, each person taken into care receives a stock of wealth, the so-called CPC, an asset investment destined to support the family in the long term (at least 8 years).

This capacity-building capital can be invested to finance social housing actions, e.g. through auto-recovery practices to finance, in collaboration with local social economy partners, productive investment actions aimed at the employment inclusion of a family member; to set up a scholarship for the child's future and/or to facilitate the acquisition of skills needed by a family member for work activities; to determine a health micro-budget able to support possible gaps in productivity at work, autonomy in housing, socialisation of families in the very long term.

The project, a first in Europe, intends to test local welfare systems, which operate on refined and complex informational bases. It focuses on providing households with a stock of wealth from which to build. Moreover, it tries for the first time to develop a multi-perspective harmonic policy that acts coherently on systems and with people in order to build alternatives in the main areas of human functioning, thus promoting the expansion of instrumental freedoms linked to housing, work, knowledge and socialisation.