The annual meeting of ACRI, which met today in Rome, approved the common programmatic guidelines to make the intervention of foundations of banking origin increasingly effective on the welfare front, a sector to which institutions allocate around 30% every year (300 million euros in 2012 alone) of their philanthropic donations.
Convinced that the response to the crisis of our welfare can only be collective, the idea is to develop innovative forms in the field of social assistance which, leveraging on the principle of subsidiarity, promote the formation of a community welfare, i.e. a welfare based on a plurality of subjects, but also of solutions, in which sustainability, equity, access and responsibility are articulated in new formats and find an essential center of gravity in the territory and in the community, however defined.
"The goal is to develop the skills and autonomy of individuals, communities and society as a whole, so that within a richer and more articulated panorama of responses in which, in addition to the State and local authorities, participate all subjects, from non-profit organizations to citizens, from supply foundations to corporate welfare, social needs can be satisfied in a way that is both universal and selective - says Giuseppe Guzzetti, president of ACRI -. On the one hand, this new welfare will be able to help avoid waste, duplication and lack of accountability, and on the other to favor the growth of the economic and social system, generating job opportunities”.
The document approved today by the Acri Assembly – prepared by a special Working Group, led by the vice president of the Association and president of the Cassa di Risparmio di Ascoli Piceno Foundation Vincenzo Marini Marini – indicates three priorities to inspire interventions in the socio- welfare: identifying models capable of pursuing objectives of both effectiveness and efficiency; implement interventions that develop or strengthen human and professional resources, as well as the networks present in the territories; promote systems of "community governance" and the provision of services capable of virtuously integrating, in a logic of subsidiarity, the public and private resources available. Obviously the document prepared by the Association is not a closed document, but it can be refined as a result of the experimentation that will follow and the contributions that will be submitted to the Working Group during the work.
Acri proposes a peculiar task for the Foundations, in the context of the third sector and in respect of the role of the local institutions in charge, characterized by a proactive search for innovation, constant attention to verifying the effectiveness and efficiency of the interventions , from the promotion of coordination between the various subjects to encourage the construction of "social networks". With regard to innovation, the Foundations can promote pilot trials of intervention models, to evaluate their effectiveness in solving problems; support the engineering of promising organizational solutions to be implemented and the diffusion of effective models, especially to reduce the fragmentation of the offer and favor the good functioning of multi-actor networks; contribute to spreading a culture of monitoring and comparative evaluation of the effectiveness, costs and benefits of welfare policies and interventions, making possible serious and well-founded processes of documentation and evaluation of the results and impacts of experimentations; collaborating with public administrations, especially local ones, together with the rest of the third sector, to take paths to make their organizations and processes more efficient; start trials of co-programming of interventions.
