Is called Emporio Portobello, will be inaugurated in Modena in May thanks to the Voluntary Service Centre, and it's not a supermarket like the others. It is one of those found, made increasingly necessary by the recession, to meet the almost 4 million poor people calculated by Istat in 2013 (from 2006 to 2011 there were 615 new poor people a day in Italy and in Milan, Italians outnumbered foreigners), which in the province of Emilia alone correspond to around 450 households: these disadvantaged families will be offered the opportunity to go shopping in exchange for a work contribution.
Here's how it works: the households most in difficulty are selected by the social services on the basis of the Isee quotient and will have a card and a certain number of stickers available free of charge for shopping within a year, if they offer, in exchange, volunteer help at the facility at least once a week. A kind of barter supermarket, in short, which aims to change the traditional pattern of consumption in the worst years of the crisis.
The president of the Volunteer Center and spokesperson for a new welfare Angelo Morselli explains "the idea came simply by listening to the problems of our fellow citizens". The first rule to take advantage of the service offered by the store is to be willing to change your lifestyle. “Portobello will be made up of three rooms: a warehouse, a real supermarket and a meeting area with the associations. We intend to establish a real dialogue with users to try to assist them in this new phase of life. Changing the style of consumption will be one of the first objectives”. The many voluntary associations active in the Modena area make the project possible and feasible and, as Morselli is keen to underline, for the first time also lay women. "We are used to seeing this type of project linked only to the world of Catholic volunteering, but in this case there are also other realities close to civic associations".
