Bari, Milan, Reggio Calabria and Palermo will host innovative courses and labs to improve access to an inclusive and qualitative education and fight school dropouts. Over 4 years, the project will involve 4000 students. Project OpenSPACE kicks off to fight educational poverty.
The project aims to make communities inclusive and responsible in order to promote the educational and cultural development, as well as the empowerment, of pre-adolescents and adolescents. Project “OpenSPACE: Spaces for Active Participation in the Education Community” is developed by ActionAid togetgher with Bayty Baytyk, Cittadinanzattiva, CONI, Fondazione Albero della Vita, Federgat, Fondazione Giovanni Paolo II, Fondazione Mondo Digitale, Arteteca, Junior Achievement Italia, Studio MCA - Mario Cucinella Architects, Comune di Bari, Reggio Calabria, Palermo and the Laboratory for Effective Anti-poverty Policies (LEAP) - Università Bocconi.
The four-year project will involve 12 first- and second-degree secondary schools in areas with a high rate of dropouts in Bari, Milan, Reggio Calabria and Palermo. It will directly involve 4000 students, about 1000 of which potential or actual dropouts, 1600 parents and 500 teachers.
In Italy, over 1 million children and teens, aging 3 to 18, live in absolute poverty, while the dropout rate (2016) was 13.8% against a Europa 2020 average of 10%, not to mention the markedly difficult situations in Sicily, Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sardinia (above the national average). The Regions with the highest dropout rates include, for first-degree secondary school, Sicily (1.3%), Calabria (1%) and Puglia and Lombardy (0.7%); for second-degree secondary schools, southern Italy has a higher average than the national one (4.8%) with Sicily at 5%, Puglia (4.7%), and Calabria (4.4%), while Lombardy has a 4% rate. Higher percentages are found amongst families in economic and socially disadvantaged conditions. These young people risk not having the right tools to build their future and be trapped in a spiral of poverty and exclusion.
In order to address this situation, the project will address both the individual dimension of young men and women through systemic, horizontal and participative actions aimed at improving their competences and the educational community by helping school to improve their role as a hub where teachers, parents, students and local associations converge to provide opportunities for everyone’s cultural growth.
Activities will be organised in three macro-areas: promotion of schools and other learning centres with intensive educational courses, reinforcement of the educational community and fighting school dropout rates. The activities will include: participative redesign of school environments, development of murals with ideas put forth by students and interpreted by artists, theatre labs, the creation and management of phyrtual innovation gyms (physical areas for experiential learning with a high technological content, information desks in school to provide further information on local opportunities, labs to prevent school dropouts, courses to develop entrepreneurship and orientation for those who drop out of school.
“School and society at large have always had a dialectic relationship in the history of our country. In some moments, schools have served as a driver; other times, they have fallen behind,” explains Luca Fanelli, Project Manager, Openspace. "In the current, it is crucial that school and civil society form a new, original alliance to promote the values of democracy, critical knowledge, equal opportunities, gender parity, pacific cohabitation and a multicultural milieu. This is the aim of Project OpenSpace.”
The project has been selected by Con i Bambini for the Fund to Contrast the Educational Poverty of Minors. The fund was created through an agreement amongst bank foundations represented by ACRI, the National Third Sector Forum and the Government. It supports actions aimed at removing obstacles of an economic, social and cultural nature that impede the full enjoyment of educational processes by minors. In order to implement the Fund’s programmes, the social enterprise “Con i Bambini,” was created in June 2016 as a non-profit entirely owned by Fondazione CON IL SUD.
For further information:
Chiara Muzzi | Media Relations Manager | ActionAid Italia
Tel +39 3316676827 chiara.muzzi@actionaid.org
Daniela Biffi | Head of Content & Media Relations | ActionAid Italia
Tel +39 3472613441 daniela.biffi@actionaid.org
