Treviso: Inglese

It firstly began in 1988, but only after a few years, with the establishment of a religious community, it acquired a sufficient stability. This new presence gave greater solidity and continuity to the initiatives of hospitality and has completed the renovation of the building where currently have their premises the religious community, and some hospitality undertakings.

The activity began first with the establishment of a residential hospitality nucleus, and then it developed as a resource in the territory for minors in psycho-social difficulty with diverse help projects and with the awareness of the area and families through the dissemination of the value of welcome.

The main purpose of the Murialdo Community is the implementation of interventions and specific responses for the reality of children and youth who lack adequate family and/or social educational support and for needy families.

The Community works closely with local social services and the energies available in the area.

It does not play as a substitute of the institutional services, but wants to act as a sign, as proposal in the running of help projects for the minors living in the area, in order to mature alternative or complementary forms of intervention and models of presence.

Retaining its autonomy in the method of education and experience management the Community tries to find new methods of intervention not only in "reparative" function but also and especially in the "preventive" one.

Hence the efforts to foster a culture of welcome in the Church and society, helping also the territory and families to mature choices of sharing and family fosterage.

The core values

The sharing of life and relationships as "friend, brother, father" is the way we think about aid projects and meet the needs of people we are entrusted. It is a style increasingly relevant in a time when poverty is more and more poverty of relationships and affection.

In the Murialdo Community’s projects of care attention to the relationships, choice of normality, a family background as the ideal environment for the growth of children, have always been the basic criteria for the construction of aid projects.

Experience has proven that the meeting with those who are wounded, painful, aggressive, lays bare the fragilities, it touches the weaknesses, and exposes to a great deal those who welcome. Also these people need to feel accepted, to live experiences of belonging, to get close travelling companions. You cannot be welcoming alone. The choice of welcoming those who need involves a growing need for confrontation and solidarity, to which the Murialdo Community answers through meetings and training of educators, volunteers, families and religious communities.

It is also the reason why we prefer guidelines that ensure stability in the relationships, ability to share, occasions for celebrations, reciprocal itineraries of spirituality and formation between religious men and women and laity.

The attention to the poor young and the choice of welcoming them were for Murialdo the result of a long personal maturation that saw him gradually open his heart to the needs of those who were near to him.

So how to be welcoming today is also the result of the awareness of having been welcomed as children by the Father’s "infinite and personal" Love and of having been loved by our parents. Only in personal relationships and within a reciprocal belonging, everyone can be aware of "feeling loved" and can begin to love. The peculiar educational style of Murialdo community turns into the following educational foundations:

a) the centrality of relationship, where, while keeping intact your role and educational task, you accept personal involvement and renounce dynamics of strength and power to reach the other’s heart because "education concerns the heart";

b) the pedagogy of the daily life, since it is in the ordinary, and in everyday life, that we create a true and authentic relationship, where you can make people participate in real life and help them develop the right sense of responsibility towards themselves and others;

c) the goal of autonomy and responsibility, with attention to relationships that do not create dependency, but point to the acquisition of an ever greater personal autonomy;

d) with competence and professionalism (“do good, but do it well"). We are not called to do all the good that is possible, but to do well do what we're doing. Loving demands some educational skills too, some tools, a shared language, agreement on the values to be transmitted and the goals to be achieved, it means welcoming according to a "life project" that ensures the person’s uniqueness with his times, his difficulties, his expectations.

Attention to the changing social context and needs of individuals: aware that the promotion action cannot be reduced to isolated and individual interventions, but requires a precise and conscious action of information and care of living spaces. At the same time there is the awareness that in help relationships it is the good of the people that can be the ultimate criterion of evaluation and not the survival and continuity of the community or individual project.

We build answers, not services

It is not a slogan but one of the value choices that characterize the Murialdo community. It is achieved by placing the person at the bottom of the planning of any help route avoiding to consider him the "user" of an already planned and organized service.

The result is the remarkable effort that is required from those working within the Community, the Social Services which contact us and the persons involved, to think and achieve together the common path.

It is more obvious in some of the projects than in others, but it is a choice of value that turns into practice and that is proving invaluable resource in different situations of individuals or families with hardship. The same choice of the Community to continue to welcome people even in projects with economic deficit is testament to the reality of this priority.

Human resources and organization

Murialdo community in Treviso is run by religious Josephites of Murialdo and lay people who share contents and values of St. Leonard’s charism and who strive to offer an operative translation of it.

At the head of the Community is constituted a participatory body (Board of governors) that, in addition to the tasks of protecting the identity of the community and the core values of Murialdine Welcome, performs the functions of planning and managing the activities.

A particular role has the dialogue and ongoing confrontation with all the people who for various reasons are present and active in the community: educators, volunteers, other employees, technicians, friends...

For proper function of the current projects the Community avails itself of some coordinators who oversee the different areas or types of intervention and are designed to facilitate the work of the several teams of educators and liaising with public bodies.

Training of the educators

The path of continuous training is an objective and a well established practice in the Murialdo Community. "Doing well the good" is not just a phrase of St. Leonard Murialdo, it is the guiding principle of every project of the Community and of its practical implementation.

That is why the basic professional preparation required of every educator is considered only the starting point of a training course which involves all the educators and is expanding to the adult figures with a role in the projects.

Volunteers
In support of the work of educators, in some help projects there are volunteers whose contributions are an additional resource available to those who are welcomed by the Community.

Their presence, in facts, is not intended as a resource for the organization, but rather as to offer a chance to live an experience of solidarity for the benefit of those in greatest need.

From the volunteers, whoever they are, therefore, the willingness is required to live with fidelity the interpersonal relationships that come up also in order to avoid that the experience may be thought and judged by criteria of personal utility.

Help projects

1) The Familiar Community

It temporarily houses minors or youth with their family of origin unable or incapable to fulfil tits goal. It is an availability offered by the Josephites’ Religious Community, of whom at least two are skilled educators, who ensure the educational path thanks to their residence in the community.

OBJECTIVES: Providing positive life models and relational contexts; promoting itineraries towards autonomy and employment. It is directed especially to minors or young people more than 16 years old.

It works in close cooperation with the sending social services and draws up specific projects for inclusion in the territory. It can accommodate up to two guests. It can find continuity of action through the continuation of support in a “getting away” apartment of the community. It is a resource made available also to minors who are granted alternative forms to juvenile penal institution.

2) The Educational Community

Located in a flat housing, it sees the continuous presence of educators who act as care and protection and who, while assuring the professionalism of the action, act with the minors in order to provide emotionally warm and positive relationships and are able to privilege sharing their lives through the experience of everyday life. The admission of a minor in the Educational Community is always and only after the proposal of the competent Social Services and following the judgment of opportunity and compatibility by the community team.

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT: Favouring pathways of autonomy by offering a welcoming environment where you can develop meaningful help relationships, and sharing of life through the experience of everyday life.

It temporarily accepts up to four minors 6 to 18 years old with families unable or incapable of fulfilling their task.

3) Care for families

TYPOLOGY OF PROJECT

It is a form of hospitality begun by the Community for several years by now; the report on the needs of a family gave us the opportunity to begin this new experience: not only welcoming one or more minors, but allowing them to live within their family retaining the ability to implement all the initiatives to support, control and supervision they need.

OBJECTIVES

The key objectives of this typology of intervention are essentially of three types: providing a safe and controlled place to operate in view of the development of parenting skills and personal responsibility and autonomy;
promoting parent-children relationships mediating, supporting and encouraging a healthy interpersonal relationship; inserting the family in the area and accompany it in this process.

The project is aimed at families with children up to 18 years.

4) Help to families in difficulty

These are projects to help families with difficulties in various areas of family and social life and for which it is appropriate to think of forms of protection and support.

The interventions are aimed at families in which there are sufficient capacity and willingness to play the parental role, and a sufficient bond between parents and children. They differ from the previous one both because all the players (including parents) are involved from the outset in the planning and evaluation of the action, and mainly because to the educational figures involved it may be requested to take direct responsibility in protecting children and in family management.

5) Afternoon Day Care Centres (or C.E.D.)

They were born to give a targeted, individual and complete response to requests for assistance from the local social services for minors at psychosocial risk. They allow carrying out personalized educational interventions.

They are directed to a group (max. 10/15) of children or boys between 6 and 14 years old.

OBJECTIVES

The aims are protection, support and prevention of hardship.

The aim is to ensure the twofold right to grow and be educated in one’s own family, thus avoiding removal from it.

7) The Open Centre

Following several reports, we started, since October 1999, an educational place open to the territory in a neighbouring town, which can freely be attended by minors of school age. This space, just referred to as "Open Centre" offers an opportunity to socialize to the minors of the area.

The project involves, in addition to the Murialdo Community, the Parish of the place (which provided the premises), a group of volunteers (who contributed to the centre’s renovation and furnishing), and the group of parents of the attending children, financially supporting the costs due to the presence of the professional educator. It is aimed at children aged between 6 and 14 years.

OBJECTIVES

The Open Centre offers assistance to families and children by targeting particularly the intervention in the direction of prevention. The planned activities go beyond the simple assistance with homework and provide experiences of association (i.e. Scout), cultural and recreational activities, outings, excursions, cultural visits etc...

8) The Youth Centre

The project of this Youth Centre was born from the need of a neighbouring town to offer some spaces to the boys of the area’s lower secondary school to develop educational itineraries complementary to the educational agencies already present in the area.

In the planning of the intervention we wanted to draw upon the specific experiences that the social cooperative "Il Sestante" and the Murialdo Community matured in years of work.

During the whole afternoon the boys are followed by professional educators with whom they relate and undertake an educational relationship.

The Project Aggregation Centre is designed to accommodate and meet adolescents aged between 11 and 14 years.

OBJECTIVES

The intent is to create a "family and friendly” environment where the individual may feel "like at home", aiming to a progressive and active participation of the various involved subjects.

9) Individualized educative interventions

This form of help comes from specific requests for accompanying in the education and school path of children with complex social and familiar hardship for whom the continuous presence of an educational figure is required.

The project is always on a specific request of the pertinent Social Services and provides for a systematic agreement between the moving forces and the minor’s family.

It can provide for the educational intervention on a single child, or his inclusion in a very small group of subjects (maximum two or three) between the ages of 6 and 14 years.

OBJECTIVES

The intervention aims to help minors to find references and containment. The systematic verification of the project allows the team to identify the most appropriate courses of action and the possible ways of supporting the household.

10) The social and educational farm

It comes out from the choice of the Murialdo Community to enhance the environmental resources at its disposal and to use these treasures for the benefit of everyone, especially people with hardship. It carries out its agricultural livestock production by offering its products in an integrated manner with the provision of cultural, educational assistance and training services to benefit vulnerable subjects.

It is a place where spaces and crops are managed and grown by operators and disadvantaged people who take care of the land and workshop areas, with a preference for organic production methods, respect for animal species, natural processes of products’ transformation.

The Social Farm is not only, in fact, a place of sustainable production. It is also a place for relationships and training in which the different skills, capabilities and resources find welcome and function in the network of relationships and the respect of personal resources. It is aimed at young people and young adults of both sexes who need a protected path of socialization to work.

OBJECTIVES: Integration and socialization, education and environmental protection, enhancement of our presence in the territory, and promotion of networks of solidarity and welcome through the functions of regional tourism and agritourism.

11) Summer Centres

First proposed in the summer of 2007 they are moments of animation and aggregation for a number of boys from Treviso and neighbouring towns.

Summer Centres are held in the same spaces and structures of the Social Farm and are arranged so as to allow the choice of participation from week to week and provide many activities always accompanied by professional educators of the Murialdo Community.

Boys and girls from 5 to 14 years can participate. The families who like so enrol them and also minors with hardship can be admitted, enrolled by the Social Services of various municipalities. They are open from July to September, Monday through Friday, from 7.30 a.m. up to 6:00 p.m. with lunch included.

There is the possibility, however, to place children in one part of the day (morning or afternoon only).

12) Working stages

For several years, the Community offers the opportunity for young people or young adults with personal or employment difficulties, to access training and socialization to work stages at the Social Farm or the assembly workshop. All the internships are initiated and conducted in collaboration with the Services for Employment of Treviso province or the Social Sanitarian Local Unity No 9.

For each trainee it is also envisaged the allocation of an educator of the Community to act as business mentor who follows the entire journey and accompanies the person in the knowledge of the place and working modalities.

To the same tutor is given the task of connecting with the promoter institution and the drafting, in team and in line with the promoting institution, of an individualized project.

It is aimed at young people and adults in situations of hardship or needing for assistance in the path of employment.

OBJECTIVES: To offer a protected experience of a working environment, to provide spaces and positive relationships with other adults, to guide and monitor their own possibilities and limitations, to acquire practical experience.

13) The Workshop

This is a workshop operating through the assembly of small items manufactured and provided by different companies in the area that does not involve the use of particular tools or specific operating methodologies.

It is active for some months at the headquarters of the Murialdo Community but it is foreseen a move in a more appropriate site also to make it more accessible to the operators.

OBJECTIVES: it does not have profit purpose, it is designed to provide a service of socialisation to work for those people who need it and who are reported by the Social Services or the SIL (Mental Care), it helps them to measure their skills and recognize their limits, by means of systematic moments of check that are conducted by those in charge of the workshop.

Young people or adults can join it through different channels: through the establishment of a training course provided by the conventions that the Murialdo Community has signed with the Service for Employment in Treviso province and the SIL of 'ULSS 9 (both supported by work grants), or through direct admission by the Murialdo Community. All those who have access to the workshop are regularly registered with INAIL (National Health Service) and covered by insurance against accidents at work.

14) Emergency house

It is a house arranged by the Community to temporarily accommodate a family unit for which a welcome project is being prepared.

Access is therefore tied to a specific planning in place and only in exceptional cases can be made available for other situations.

15) “Getting away” apartment

This is a small housing that meets the need to continue to give support to autonomy paths for young people ending their stay in the familiar community or in the educational community. Even in this case access is tied to a specific planning and is temporary.