Innovation: Community Lab

Italy

AAI Domain: Participation in society (social connectedness, political participation)

It can require a social innovation in order to develop social innovations to meet the challenges of contemporary society. This includes poverty affecting groups of people who had not traditionally experienced it, the decline of social cohesion and meeting the new demands being placed on social welfare systems. The traditional institutions of governance – the municipality, regional government, the public sector and non-governmental organisations as well as private sector organisations – need to develop new ways of working together in partnership. It is vital that citizens are actively involved in co-creating socially innovative solutions but this can be challenging for all of the different actors involved in the process.

The northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna has long been recognised as a centre for innovative approaches to economic and social challenges. In the context of the post-2008 financial crisis and consequent economic difficulties, the regional authorities decided that this ‘crisis’ provided the opportunity for social innovation to be harnessed to develop new approaches and solutions to a range of social issues.

In order to facilitate social innovation, the Community Laboratory was established in 2012 with the remit to develop and support community empowerment as both a means and an end in addressing pressing social issues. The Community Laboratory seeks to develop greater understanding of the micro-context of social issues in localities through social mapping of needs and the intertwined social relationships that characterise communities.

With an ethos of community empowerment, the Community Laboratory assists local social actors to develop new approaches to address pressing social issues from the ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down.’ It assists in the development of social innovations and their evaluation as a form of collective learning that is then collated into a bank of good practice in social innovation that can then be adapted and adopted across the region and beyond.

The Community Laboratory has provided support to social innovations providing assistance to new parents in Parma before and after the birth of their child, with participatory planning on public policy priorities in Reno, how to use community involvement to improve care for people living with pain related to chronic conditions and the Abitanza community empowerment project in the Villafranca district of Forli. The Community Laboratory also organises welfare workshops in conjunction with the Department for Social Policies for the Emilia-Romagna region and the Regional Healthcare and Social Agency to support the development of a new regional agenda for welfare provision based on the exchange of information, ideas and innovative practices to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of provision.

In relation to active ageing, the Community Laboratory is a social innovation that enables new forms of political participation based on community empowerment and the co-creation of initiatives to develop, be supported and evaluated. It also has relevance to building strong social connections within and across communities to enable new solutions to be developed from the grassroots.

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