Thanks to the European UIA Program, Turin Municipality has given us an abandoned public space to boost social innovation and participation.
Our challenge now is to give a kick-off to a collective use of the space, particularly targeting young adult citizens. Together we want to engage young adults in facilitating their autonomy process as well as their active citizenship. We aim to generate new responses to their needs and we'll focus on the key points of any adult life: work and parenthood.

Turin, Piendmont, Italy

The context that young adults live today in Turin is depressed by the economic and social situation that has been going on for years and recently has been worsened by the pandemic, with a youth unemployment rate of 20.7%.
Young adults spontaneously have reasons to join forces in order to face together all typical challenges of their life range: new birth arrival, children's growth and education, search of a job, economic management of expanding family.
The idea of the project is to offer to this target a space and a useful support to facilitate processes of exchange and participation in the construction of concrete answers to face the great issues regarding managing parenthood and at the same time getting in (or keeping its own position) in the labor market.

We intend to address critical issues affecting the 18 to 35 age group. Within this target, we especially refer to parents with children under 12, single parents, young people who are unemployed or affected by precarious work, young people in conditions of social disadvantage, who come from migratory experiences, young adults with disabilities or economic and social weakness, young freelance and entrepreneurs.
Particular attention will be given to the involvement of parents belonging to single-parent families (more present by incidence in our neighborhood) and to young adults who live in situations of particular disadvantage. The final beneficiary of the project is the entire area community that is experiencing chronic disadvantage situations in this phase.

- Information and training sessions about Work and Parenthood
The partners will use their experience by organazing moments of aggregation and comparison, followed by smaller meetings, surveys and interviews that will be collected and published as podcasts; we'll launch a crowfunding campaing in order to creare a local web radio that facilitates the exchange and knowledge of territorial resources

- Debate to encourage the outsourcing of needs, proposals and requests of the inhabitants of the neighborhood.
It is a debate format aimed at investigating themes, challenges, needs and desires of the young adults involved, based on the exchange of ideas of the participants. The event stages a debate, in which an imaginary candidate intends to define the political program on family and work issues. Local citizens interested in these issues will bring proposals for program points that will be discussed and debated by the participants, thanks to an artistic and participatory mediation.

- Tool library
Creation of a system of exchange and loan of useful objects / tools for children care and house keeping and managment between people, to lighten economically fragile families from these costs.

- Accompaniment to self-organizing processes
Experienced professionists will also support the creation of a possible association among the participants, as an expected outcome.

We estimate that the structure may initially involve about 50 families, and once fully operational (in 12 months) over 250 people involved.
We foresee creating a cohesive, active, informed and capable group of young adults in the area. We hope that, with the time, they´ll be able to represent democratically the typical requests and needs of that target, concerning work and parenthood. The local community will be endowed with bottom-up they space of self-determination and comparison, able to offer self-organized services rather than services imagined today by local political decision-makers.

Our goal is to guarantee the collective use of a space for citizens, which generates new responses to their needs starting from their active participation and through shared management.
In the debate, the program points to be discussed will start from proposals from the various stakeholders who express themselves on concrete issues that citizens experience in their daily lives, exploring and bringing out the opinions and ideas of the citizens themselves to encourage dialogue and active participation.
The events will be built thanks to a format that is based on a "frame" (similar to that of a convention) and on a structure that stimulates the involvement and participation of the public in the creation and discussion of contents (through participatory installations and group dynamics).

Elena La Rovere, Fernando Spalletta, Diego Coriasco, have been working in Patchanka, managing a special non-profit Employment Agency for people who have greater difficulties in entering the labor market: former prisoners, disabled people, migrants, young neet.

Stefano Romano and Fernando Spalletta are among the founders of + Spazio4, the neighborhood house near Habitat and work daily in contact with and for the neighborhood community.
Lidia Greco works in Stranaidea for European project implementation. She is strongly motivated for this project as a social co-operator and inhabitant of the neighborhood where it takes place.
Annacarla Bosco is the expert on community theater and audience engagement of Stranaidea.
All team wish to increase civic cohesion and engagement of the area

personnel costs 30400
Communication expenses 3600
Material 1000

We would like to be inspired by those who have already started similar initiatives about their sustainability.
The main challenge is to generate a social support network within the territory, with positive effects on the population, thanks to the development of networks of proximity and solidarity.