Who we are

The constitution of a social state, engaged to reduce inequalities and granting the same condition, needs three complementary pillars: a working country, a market based on equality and justice, a society producing public welfare and able to establish solidarity, competence and effectiveness.
This prospective puts people and communities at the centre of the social constitution giving to everybody, even to the weakest, the right of citizenship in order to remove the obstacles which do not allow people their whole development, and to join individual and social rights to promote the global development of society.
Among the different forces acting in the social state, there is the outstanding and modern ” third sector”. It cooperates with the public institutions aiming at common targets and at social-charitable special purposes.
The social cooperative L’Isola di Arturo (Arthur’s Island) ONLUS, was born from the desire of a group of professional people to put together their own experiences, got in years of training within the social circle, in order to take initiatives to improve people’s and groups’ lifestyles.
These experts, with professional competence and the different competences in the human and social sciences, urban ecology, organization and management of complex questions, planning design, educational psychology and teenager and childhood culture, have been marking for a long time locally and nationally agencies to promote programmes aimed at everybody’s welfare by developing more suitable urban environments with common living requirements.
The social cooperative L’Isola di Arturo makes use of the specific competences of its components and external consultants needed in some specific cases.

 

INTERVENTIONS
The cooperative offers strategies and models of intervention to the public and private institutions, to the local authorities and to every citizen and it is available to inform and give advice about:
- Promotion, planning, organization and/or management of gathering multi-educational, laboratorial and recovery centers;
- Promotional of services in favour of the youngest and of people risking social isolation;
- Coordination and promotion of disabled people in the society;
- Safeguard, improvement and advancement of the physical, natural, landscapist social and cultural environment and territory;
- Promotion and organization of activities and cultural shows;
- Promotion of the cultural intermediation with respect to the “diversity”;
- Promotion and accomplishment of the design planning;
- Constitution of teenagers’ municipal and intermunicipal councils;
- Promotion of plays and recreational activities;
- Promotion of projects and interventions against the minors’and the women’s exploitation;
- Technical advice in favour of the social policies and of the social and economic development;
- Promotion of school orientation activities and professional training.


WAYS OF INTERVENTION
- Networking with the Institutions, the Associations, the Agencies and the citizens;
- Plan-sharing with the involvement of the different operators;
- Aiming behavioural promotion about lifestyles and health as well as social welfare;
- Improvement of the environment;
- Promotion and safeguard of the people’s rights and of the disabled;
- Regulation of the development in different sector with the citizens’ participation;
- Innovation and implementation of the services;
- Participation at everyone’s aims, at the strategies for the local development and at the organization of net for public and private resources.

 

The Cooperative pinpoints three macrospheres for the pursuit of these aims, on which it can act:
Spazio Sociale (Social Space);
Laboratorio delle Tradizioni (Traditions’Laboratory);
Partecipazione (Participation).
Let’s define the second and the third sphere, overlooking the first one, that’s already characterized:

Traditions’ Laboratory
Laboratorio delle Tradizioni (Traditions’Laboratory) is a cultural project by L’Isola di Arturo (Arthur’s Island).
The aim, trough the treating of topics related to every form of traditions, is the diffusion and the promotion of the knowledge, the meeting and the confrontation among people, getting through every kind of physical, generational, racial, original, religious, economic and social prejudice, limit or barrier.
Laboratory is conceived as a work’s “space”, in which it’s possible building a wide and spread culture of cohabitation based on the knowledge;
Traditions are conceived as a transmission of cultural heritage of a community, of a territory, among a one generation and another, that symbolize their identification and typical element.
The aim of this project is incentivizing the other and oneself knowledge, through the humus introduction in which the different cultures pierce roots, beginning from the whole Italy.
This experience is the path of life and work result that let the cooperative meet places, stories, and, first of all, people with different and various origin, age and thought. This has enriched our cultural baggage, eliciting the interest to “the other” and the desire to extend the ways of thinking, trough the deepening and the knowledge.
The Laboratory is a space of reciprocal exchange and knowledge, where it will make every news, material and knowledge available to everyone who wants to participate to this site, contributing with interventions and attestations, according to our objectives and our purposes.
Through handmade tasks, tales and imagines of people involved in this space, we will try to recreate the smells, the sounds and the backgrounds known directly or through family tales in the mind, in the memory and in the senses of who will visit the site.
At the same time we will propose sensorial journeys in different countries, in far and present ages, discovering new cultures. It will introduce texts and images of the past, books and films that represent those cultures and traditions, together with an actual “discriminating reading”.
The aware and respectful cohabitation arises from the recovery and knowledge of traditions (so from the culture of everyone), today!
A basic section is the meeting/confrontation, time by time, of two persons, different for age, nationality, background, gender, thought, in the most various and possible combinations, in a few minutes face to face confrontation, about topics introduced in the present. In this way the prejudice (it’s always in ambush) disappears from the minds and in this way a sympathetic civilization arises.

 

Participation
The age where we live is the consequence of a long period in which the citizen has felt very less supported by who manages the public affair, by who rules, in a local and in an international sphere. He has a very strong desire to have faith again already lost, to get whom it needs rebuild a society, a community indeed, that takes charge for the choices concerning herself, beginning to rebuild livable and recognisable places.
We can regenate faith only restituting to the people, to her participation, to her investment, a constructive opportunity of visible and verifable solutions.
This is the biggest planning gamble to ricover cohesiveness, that (the gamble) develops widely in the local autonomies, finding reasons and efficacy in participant occurrences. The Cooperative L’Isola di Arturo (Arthur’s Island) aims at the promotion of a social and civic awareness’s diffusion, just through the participation of young generations, “the citizen of tomorrow”, encouraging the Kids City Council’s case to the Institutions.
This reality was born in France in 1979, when a structure was built, for the first time, to let the kids be spokespersons of own interests. Then, the mayors of the biggest cities of the world met in 1992 in Istituto degli Innocenti (Innocents’ Institute) in Florence; they got off the Kids City Council’s experience, in collaboration with municipalities and educational institutes, also in Italy.
The basic philosophy of these institutes, now as then, is the approaching children and kids to the Institutions, through a bigger awareness of citizen’s rights and duties in a community, encouraging them to a dynamic and conscientious participation to the territorial life, giving them the possibility to express needs and proposals.
In this way the kids discuss and compare themselves to the same age kids, to the teachers and to the Institutions too, carrying on own ideas, own way to live the reality in the school and the city and expressing opinions on how it can change. Every student of elementary and junior high school can present himself (or herself) as a candidate setting up electoral programs (projects) to elect, through free elections, a Kids City Council that can enforce an active cityzenship’s rights.

 

 

 

Informazioni aggiuntive