We discover the path and activities of the Community Foundation of Agrigento and Trapani, an engine of aggregation, planning and development in its local organisations.
The Community Foundation of Agrigento and Trapani is a reality that works to aggregate and enhance the energies of a large, beautiful and not always easy local organisations, involving its actors on common initiatives. In six years of activity, the Foundation has developed an interesting model of territorial animation and “virtuous” approach to European projects.
Even from its founding act, the Community Foundation of Agrigento and Trapani was able to bring together 10 very different actors: dioceses, cooperatives and consortiums, associations and ethical banks, research centers and other foundations. And today it is well reflected in what was said about community foundations in a special guide produced by Assifero, which defined Community Foundations as accelerators of planning on which to converge public and private community resources, establishing alliances and fostering co-design on complex issues; and as platforms for participation and catalyzing resources for the welfare of communities.
Let’s find out together what their model consists of, the ingredients of its success, and its prospects for development.
We talk about this with Mariacristina Morsellino, Coordinator of Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation Programs at the Community Foundation of Agrigento and Trapani. Mariacristina is part of a dynamic team, largely composed of young people who have been able to bring back to their local organisations a wealth of experience gained in other parts of Italy and Europe: at ease both in dialoguing with the small realities of the Trapanese and Agrigento areas and in juggling European funds and international partnerships. He greets us with a big smile, a fast speech, and above all a lot of enthusiasm for his land and his work.
Who are you and what does your mission consist of?
Our foundation was born six years ago, in 2019, after a 5-year journey of territorial animation. It is a path that defines its identity: it is a community foundation, i.e., a civil society organization, secular and independent, that arises from the needs of the actors of a local organisations (that of the provinces of Agrigento and Trapani) and promotes its social, economic, cultural and environmental development.
Our local organisations are large and fragmented. It has some unenviable characteristics, such as low entrepreneurial density and high rates of educational poverty, school dropout, unemployment and youth emigration. But it is also at the center of the Mediterranean, is made up of a large number of small municipalities, and is enriched by the passion and commitment of many local, national, and international people, organizations, and businesses who want to contribute to its development.
We are not alone: foundations like ours have also flourished in other local organisations, such as in the Noto Valley and Messina, just to stay in Sicily. Different local organisations and different community foundations, which have also created their own equally valid and interesting model. Also thanks to the Foundation with the South, which has dedicated a special support program to foundations like ours.
Six years is not a long time: how did you get started? And how did you approach European projects?
Our Foundation started its activities between 2019 and 2020, in the midst of the “Covid period.”
This period somewhat marked our organization. In fact, when we started we could count on many Sicilian people who were working elsewhere but had returned because of the restrictions and the situation at that time. Many of these people started working with us, and some have stayed with our foundation. They brought new blood, new skills, and new mindsets, while maintaining a pragmatic approach that is well grounded in the local context.
Also, again because of the situation at that time, our staff did not concentrate in one office, but immediately started working directly from the location. This type of organization has remained, and now our staff is spread out over the local organisations and can serve them better, staying anchored in the local context and optimizing on travel.
From our very first projects, thanks in part to the background of the people who worked with our Foundation, we cared as much about the nature and needs of our local organisations as we did about its links with other local organizations and Europe. We immediately organized ourselves into two main areas, one dedicated to local cooperation programs and one dedicated to Euro-Mediterranean cooperation programs. Two organizational areas united by the same objective, the development of our local organisations, and the same tool, collaboration.
In a local organisations such as ours, with limited human and material resources, collaboration is an indispensable ingredient. By organizing ourselves in this way, we have set ourselves two main goals: to enrich and grow the human resources of our local organisations, creating collaboration at the local level to enhance their potential and energy; and to attract economic and intangible resources by developing good projects. Projects (especially European ones) that in turn require collaboration locally and internationally.
Getting resources through European projects is not easy. How did you do it?
Our Foundation does not work by “chasing calls,” but by pursuing its goals and identifying the most appropriate means to achieve them. European calls for proposals are one such means, along with fundraising (this is how we carried out our very first activities during the Covid emergency), national calls for proposals, and other types of intervention. It is important to work in a flexible and participatory way, using a sufficiently wide range of approaches and tools. One should not focus on one type of activity, one type of resource, one way of working.
We have done many successful European projects through a large investment of time and strategy. Trying to do one project a year does not give certainty; it is not a sustainable approach. We need method and strategy: we often bang our heads against European projects and are disappointed because we start with one call, with little attention and little experience, without taking the necessary time. And it can seem like a waste of time. We invested the entire first year in screening, developing contacts and surveying possibilities and opportunities: and this investment paid off.
In addition, we had people in-house who had already worked on European projects-this is also an approach we recommend. It is much better to have people in-house who know how to work with European projects. External consultants are useful to support and manage the workload, but an in-house figure provides an overall vision, which is very important to carry out a good project.
Our first project was The Sound of Entrepreneurship, dedicated to training musicians in the digital sphere, an Erasmus KA2 project implemented as a partner. The second was Youth Social Changemakers, focused on adolescent empowerment and combating educational poverty, a small scale Erasmus+ project, implemented as a leader. Then our growth on European projects was regular: we started working on the COSME / Single Market program ( BREED project on the social economy), on CERV, and from there we continued, making the choice to differentiate programs based on our objectives and the needs of our local organisations, which are very varied.
These projects are almost always, at the same time , points of departure, arrival, and transition. Collaboration activates new perspectives, new ways to accomplish things together, to pool resources and create more efficient processes. Let me give an example. On one of our projects we had to reshape our activities, making them itinerant in the local organisations. Out of this small “setback” on the project came the knowledge of a space that could host 3d printing workshops for kids, from which new activities were then born. The European project thus becomes a way to enhance local resources in a very simple way. It creates new conditions for collaboration, even at the local level.
Your activities and projects are very varied. What subject areas do you deal with?
Our activities are organized into three main pillars, all of which serve the growth of our local organisations.
First and foremost, we work in the area of educational welfare and inclusion, focusing especially on fragile groups, on young people and on countering phenomena that are unfortunately widespread in our local organisations, such as educational poverty, school dropout, unemployment and youth emigration. Our projects seek to reverse this trend by working on youth empowerment, technical skills (digital, sustainability), social innovation and entrepreneurship.
We then work in supporting thesocial economy to address another of the big problems in our local organisations, low entrepreneurial density. We focus exclusively on social impact enterprises and socially responsible enterprises, providing various types of support: small direct funding, coaching and training activities, support for crowdfunding activities. Some of the resources and activities are possible through participation in European programs, such as the Single Market Program, which includes third-party crowd-funding among its budget categories.
The third area in which we work is the protection and enhancement of natural and cultural heritage, which is very important for Sicily. For example, the Fa Bene Sicilia project has enabled the creation of a social cooperative that supports sustainable local producers through the activation of e-commerce tools that can give access to new market niches. And again we work with European projects, for example through Erasmus exchange and training initiatives in the area of sustainability (e.g., Cities Go Climate Neutral project for municipal employees).
Can you tell us about any of your projects?
We have a page dedicated to all our projects, where you can find the ones we have mentioned. But I will tell you about some of them that I particularly care about.
Let’s start with our first pillar of activity, educational welfare. We have already mentioned the Youth Social Changemakers: we are particularly keen on it because it is the first one we have won, and it is also akin in spirit to that of your Guide, because it teaches young people how to do design for community development. It applies the challenge-based learning approach, which involves a short initial training, then a challenge given to the team of boys to apply their knowledge in creative and personal ways. The youth teams identified areas to focus on. Then they developed both a call for proposals and a response to the call for proposals-this way they considered both the perspective of the call writer and the perspective of the project writer, both of which are very important. The proposals were then evaluated by the students themselves based on classical criteria (again, to put themselves in the perspective of those evaluating a project) and micro-grants were given to try to implement the selected initiatives: small projects to promote sustainability, student services, coworking and virtual communities.
Another interesting project in this area is EMPATISE, an Erasmus+ KA2 School Education project that we implemented as lead partner. It aims to combat educational poverty through empowerment and exchange activities for educators and teachers. It is aimed at (and intends to develop) “educating communities” that embrace all those who work with adolescents (particularly from the most fragile groups) in the context of school and extracurricular activities, sports and leisure, improving their collaboration and capacities to respond to the educational and growth needs of young people.
On the second pillar, the social economy, we have several projects carried out through direct support or European projects: one of the first was Beehive Value South, made possible by the return of three boys during the Covid period. The guys were working elsewhere for large multinationals and wanted to use the opportunity of return and smart working to repopulate the local organisations. They created a coworking space, where thanks to a small contribution from us, they created a network and activated consulting and coaching activities. Beehive is now a social enterprise, a community incubator and an active promoter of the concept of “Southworking“: an opportunity to bring young people back to Southern Italy.
Another project from our first European projects as project leader is BREED, an acronym for Building community REsiliencE and sustainable Development through social economy (funded by COSME). We finished it a few months ago: it is a partnership project with several municipalities and public bodies in European metropolitan areas, supported by one of the European networks dedicated to the topic, ENSIE. It aims to support the social economy by promoting public-private collaboration. It has organized learning missions to other countries for small teams, composed of a municipal official and 3 local organisations active in the social economy sector. From these experiences, each municipality launched a series of participatory workshops for public and private actors, issued a call for proposals to select 20 local actors related to the social economy, and developed an action plan for promoting the social economy in their local organisations. An “pathfinder” initiative at the Sicilian, if not Italian, level that can inspire other local organisations on this path. In this project we ran into linguistic and regulatory difficulties: “social economy” meant different things depending on the context. But out of these difficulties also came the opportunity to integrate new points of view into a concept that is itself very broad, and create deeper exchanges.
On the third pillar, the enhancement of natural and cultural heritage, we have several projects that also intersect with the previous ones. For example, the Ecotours, supported by the Single Market Program, involves both exchange and capacity-building activities and the provision of financing to third parties, mini-grants with which beneficiary companies can carry out more targeted activities (e.g., acquiring certification in the environmental field useful for their business); and again, the promotion of crowdfunding activities and the launching of joint projects, in particular of integrated circular tourism itineraries, capable of mobilizing all the actors in a local organisations.
Another successful experience in this area, which at the same time shows another way in which the Foundation intervenes in the local organisations, is the Diffuse Infopoint project, which came into being thanks to a small but effective capacity building intervention at the 5 Senses Diffuse Museum in Sciacca as part of the Inclusive Breakdowns. Through a crowdfunding platform, six local entities were given six months and targeted support to raise at least 40 percent of the resources needed for their projects. Organizations able to raise at least 40 percent of the resources needed for their project received the additional resources through a grant from our Foundation, which helped them turn the ideas into reality.
This is an example of how even small interventions can help strengthen the capacity, initiative and desire to network of organizations in a local organisations. And how important it is to act with different tools, of which European projects are one piece of a more comprehensive approach.
And then there would be so many other projects, I could talk about them for hours!
A great wealth of ideas, but also of strategies and tools with which you implement them. What are your plans for the future and what do you recommend to our readers?
One of our big goals for the near future is to become increasingly effective in developing local networks: expanding the number of local organizations we work with-and growing them.
And here is a cue for your readers. The important thing is not to win the call, but to implement the project. We are able to write good projects, but alone we cannot do much. Widening our network is essential for our work to work. By widening our network we have formed a network of capable and trusted individuals that allows us to implement projects. This is something that allows us to launch calmly on new activities, knowing that resources will be distributed in our local organisations, contributing to its growth, and that the work to be done will also be distributed. In this way, our and our organizations’ capacities continue to grow. We all continue to grow.
This approach is fundamental to the Sicilian reality. Resources are limited and despite this there is not always a collaborative approach. Our activity helps to change the mentality of local organisations, getting them out of dynamics of rivalry and competition. It teaches that sharing is not taking away; it enables everyone to have more. Even to us: our Foundation can do so much also and especially thanks to them. Widening the network for us is not simply “participatory spirit,” but a real lesson learned.
To do this, the right attitude is one of active and proactive listening. It is necessary to talk to, listen to, and understand each other whenever there is a difficulty or friction to be resolved. And also do so, more simply, whenever there is something to be done. Our experience teaches us that there are always those who can do things better than we can: if you want to work harder and better you have to look for them and find them.
Then of course, there are the difficulties, and these are well seen when working in European projects.
In small organizations, we mostly see difficulties arising from a lack of trained and dedicated staff. But projects themselves are learning tools, where it is natural to try and try again. Just trying is already something that brings lessons and added value. Even when a project does not pass, a form explains the reasons why and allows you to do better the next time.
We have a small vademecum for working on European projects, useful for our partners and ourselves. Which has these main points:
- Things not to do while working on European projects. 1) Run after calls for proposals. 2) Accepting any role or project in order to participate. 3) Get discouraged;
- Things to watch out for when working on European projects. 1) Identifying the right call, devoting time and strategy to screening and mapping. 2) Timelines, bureaucracy, signing up for platforms and using templates. 3) Partner screening, using all available tools (own networks, dedicated European platforms, national and European networks, social), aiming for complementarity of expertise and European added value. 4) Budget and various constraints (call specifications, potential risks, conservative estimate of commitment and timeframe);
- Things to aim for by working on European projects. 1) Unlocking the potential of creative processes and synergies. 2) Capacity building (internal and external). 3) Broadening the range of services offered by one’s organization. 4) Capitalization of initiatives.
Taking these suggestions, and with the feeling that there would be so much more to say, we greet Mariacristina and thank her for her testimony.
The activity of Community Foundations, in Sicily and other parts of Italy, brings excellent insights both to those who intend to approach European projects and to those who, like our Guide, want to create an environment conducive to their development. We will try to give further visibility to other such initiatives.
