Local background of the social innovations Brescia is a middle-sized city situated in the east of the Lombardy region, with 189,085 inhabitants1. It is the main town of one of the twelve provinces of the region and the second largest municipality in the region by population. The metropolitan area counts around 500,000 inhabitants, and the…
28.1 Short description The municipality of Brescia has been managing for two decades an Employment Insertion Service (Servizio per l’Inserimento Lavorativo, or SAL). It is a “second-level” service that only takes on persons signalled by either public social services or by services run by third sector bodies with long-lasting collaborative relations with the municipality. Like…
29.1. Short description The association “Bimbo chiama bimbo” (child calls child) stems from the solidarity activities carried out at the end of the 1990s in favour of Croatian children hit by the war by a group of families close to a parish in the Brescia neighbourhood of Mompiano. In 2004 it was officially created as…
30.1. Short description The project was developed by Immobiliare Sociale Bresciana (ISB, Brescia Social Real Estate Agency in English). ISB is a consortium of cooperatives born in 2001 with the aim of developing social housing projects, both supporting the participating cooperatives to do it and developing its own projects building new apartments or recuperating buildings…
31.1. Short description This project was also developed by Immobiliare Sociale Bresciana. Fare e abitare is a very small but quite innovative project devoted to young people (aged 18-30 years) who want to leave their family and live independently. Two apartments (100 per cent furnished) are available, one for two young people and the other…
32.1. Short description The project has been developed by a very small cooperative, the Cooperative Scalabrini Bonomelli. The cooperative was born in 1990 as a building cooperative, acknowledging migrants’ needs voiced out in the Brescia Diocese Secretariat for Migrants8 (“Segretariato Migranti della Diocesi di Brescia”) from 1981 onwards. The cooperative’s mission was, from the beginning,…
The quite different cases of social innovation presented here suggest some conclusions in relation to financing, duration of projects/programmes and networking. The scarcity of resources, especially in these years of crisis, is a recurrent element in our cases. Need (and also applications) for income support, employment insertion, housing inclusion and other kinds of help have…
33.1. Short description The “Fondazione3 Welfare Ambrosiano” (FWA) was created by a heterogeneous core of both institutional and associative stakeholders: the Municipality of Milan; the Province of Milan; the Milan Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Handcraft and Agriculture; the three main Milanese trade unions (CGIL, Camera del Lavoro Metropolitana; CISL, Unione Sindacale Territoriale di Milano; and…
34.1. Short description Investing in and reorganising the early child care services system was one of the programme points of the campaign for mayor Giuliano Pisapia in the winter/spring of 2010/2011 (Costa and Sabatinelli 2013). The commitment of the new administration for a more inclusive, open and plural city was intended as a frame of…
35.1. Short description The Fondazione Housing Sociale (FHS) has been chosen as a case on innovation in housing policies in Milan even if its scope is regional and now, as will be explained, national. It is a pioneer experience that gave birth to the first ethical fund for social housing in Italy, anticipating ad hoc…