CO-STANZA

A community welfare project that puts the person at the centre of the system

Co-Stanza is a co-working space with an area for babies for freelancers and public and private sector employees who choose agile working in a multifunctional space, with areas dedicated to work and wellness and a community of experts to support their professional and personal life. In order to promote female employment and, at the same time, the wellbeing of workers, CO-STANZA has created a welfare project shared with and accessible to companies, third-sector entities and public administrations, which focuses on children, young people, adults, the elderly and families.

It supports the concepts of identity, culture, diversity and inclusion by activating projects in which skills, abilities, experimentation and learning favour exchanges and the sharing of time and spaces by adults and children. Since its inception it has promoted processes of listening to local voices in order to identify the specific and emerging needs of the community, to enhance people and ideas and co-design interventions aimed at fostering growth from a human, professional, cultural and social point of view. A system of integrated services that – by facilitating meetings with otherness, in a network with members of private and public social life and through tools and languages that are appropriate to ages and needs – addresses issues related to everyone’s everyday life.

We are convinced that we are a resource that can move change and innovation from childhood onwards, and are
capable of bringing out new social resources and activating community ties – we build spaces for intergenerational and inter-institutional convergence. These are places dedicated to encouraging the recognition of people in the diversity of their subjectivities and biographies, places that enhance creative and expressive skills to trigger dynamics that provide an opportunity, especially to younger generations, to engage as actors and advocates within and for their local communities, to express themselves in social, cultural and artistic activities, giving rise to new forms of self-organisation and, finally, to find themselves in the political culture of ‘emerging from problems
together’, co-producing common goods that are accessible to all, with an inclusive perspective, interacting with institutions and building equal dialogue with the adults in the community.

The pandemic has revealed that, above all, children and young people are at the mercy of the economic and cultural
resources of their own families, which often lack an organised system that can compensate for cases in which that endowment is reduced. The ‘attempted’ tools of family-work reconciliation have revealed a conflict between different rights and different subjects: the contradictory nature of interventions that de-institutionalise the family cycle has emerged, taking the form either of gender or equal opportunity policies, or of policies aimed at only one of the subjects (children, women, single women, the elderly) and not at the family, or finally, of workfare policies, in which the shift towards using work to resolve the problem is the predominant point of view. Each
of these options has weaknesses.

It is necessary to adopt a perspective that leads to a vision of reconciliation that not only allows for the multiplicity of factors and all the actors and players involved in the process to be considered, but also, through the consideration of reconciliation as a social relationship, allows for the connection between dimensions and subjectivity