The Comune dei Popoli project co-financed by the European Union is part of the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (FAMI) 2014-2020 program. The partnership, led by the City of Siracusa, is formed by Impact Hub Siracusa, Accoglierete, ARCI Siracusa, C.PIA Siracusa Alberto Manzi, Fondazione di solidarietà Marista Champagnat e Oxfam Italia. The area of intervention of the project is the integration of migrants with policies and actions co-designed on the territory.
Comune dei Popoli was in fact created to respond to the need of migrant citizens to orient themselves in the territory in which they live and learn to access services (health, education, administrative, logistical, legal) in an autonomous and effective manner with respect to their needs. At the same time, public operators do not possess all the tools needed to improve the accessibility of services. This increases the risk of welfarism, which does not allow citizens to move independently and does not alleviate the difficulties in which operators find themselves. The objective of the project is therefore to increase the sense of community and develop the ability to regain ownership of public space for all citizens living in the area, to ensure that operators of public and private social are masters of new tools and new processes that can facilitate their work, and activate new forms of accompaniment towards the autonomy of all citizens and towards a community, more aware, integrated and cohesive. Comune dei Popoli foresees the qualification and strengthening of the offer of public services through the training of operators and the sharing of new strategies and tools designed ad hoc, and the activation of forms of support and accompaniment for public and private social operators in order to bring foreign citizens closer to services that are unknown or difficult to access, with the aim of making both parties autonomous and facilitating the daily life of the whole community. The project “Comune dei Popoli” (Municipality of Peoples) takes the form of a service orientation desk that, with the support of qualified operators, guides foreign citizens in the fulfillment of their administrative needs. It is a place where information, awareness and promotion of multiculturalism, as well as a documentation and training center come to life.

Impact Hub Siracusa, as a partner, takes care of the following: mapping of services and interviews; thematic focus groups; co-design of the spaces of the Comune dei Popoli office; widespread sharing; communication.

PROGRAM: European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and European Investment Fund (EIF)

 

PARTNERSHIP

Leader: Banca Popolare Etica

Partner: Microfinance,The Hub Sicily a.p.s., Consorzio Sol.Co. – Network of Sicilian social enterprises, The Ape – Agency for the promotion of social cooperation
Ethical finance

 

 

MACRO-INTERVENTION AREA: Ethical finance

JEREMIE Sicily European Social Fund (ESF) Social Finance is a financial instrument activated by agreement between the European Investment Fund (EIF) and Banca Popolare Etica (BPE). It is part of the larger Joint European Resources for Micro to Medium Enterprises (JEREMIE) framework initiative launched by the European Commission and European Investment Bank (EIB) to improve access to finance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The project provides for the disbursement of funds destined for “social finance”, ie credit to small and medium-sized enterprises (social enterprises and cooperatives, as well as individual entrepreneurs), social problems (unemployment, reintegration, accessibility), as well as support for microcredit (including individual credit). The maximum loan is set at 100.000 EUR.
From the results of the project, Impact Hub Siracusa has published a publication with the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), included in the “Compendium on good practices – Boosting Social Enterprise Development” published by the OECD in 2017.

The instrument aims to support the expansion of two kinds of enterprises located in Italy’s Sicily region:
●● SMEs, including micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), operating with a social purpose
●● social enterprises: operators in the social economy whose main objective is achieving social impact, rather than maximizing profits for owners or shareholders.

JEREMIE Sicily supports the creation and development of SMEs and social enterprises promoting the economic empowerment of vulnerable worker categories by fostering access to, and sustainable inclusion in, the labor market through a microfinance scheme. The initiative comprises a complete system of integrated services, including fund provision, business development services, coaching and mentoring, business incubation programs, and education and training. It operates in Sicily, a territory characterized by the lowest employment rate (42.4%)3 of all European regions and the unstable financial situation of public institutions, as well as private and public bodies supporting entrepreneurship.

Managed by BPE, which acts as a financial intermediary and co-ordinator, the initiative draws on a combination of public-private funds to provide microloans. To minimize risks for both beneficiaries and the bank, the consortium has partnered with the “Microcredito Siciliano” guarantee fund to finance SMEs with lower credit ratings. The consortium partners are a diverse mix of financial and non-financial entities performing several fundamental activities: engaging with territorial hubs, co-working and incubation spaces; promoting the initiative within local and regional networks of enterprises, industries and professional associations; and providing funds and non-financial services to support beneficiaries’ sustainable and ethical growth.

ROLE IN THE PROJECT:
Partners, Business support, Business plan editing, credit access services

PROGRAM: Che Fare – Doppiozero

 

PARTNERSHIP

Leader: The Hub Sicilia Soc. Coop. (Siracusa)

Partner: Ufficio Programmi Complessi (UPC) del Comune di Siracusa (Siracusa), Tavolo del Futuro (Siracusa), Turismo sostenibile

 

 

MACRO-INTERVENTION AREA: Sustainable tourism

The IBM Foundation in 2012 selects Syracuse for the Smart City Challenge. “Working together for industrial transformation” is one of IBM’s recommendations to the city. The goal of ITI is to respond to this challenge, creating an unconventional and transferable product: industrial tourism. A mix of crossings (by train, bike), visits (on-site), meetings (in the flesh) and virtual experiences (App) to force the reunification of the two divided souls of Syracuse: the Petrochemical Pole, a sector in slow decline on the which the city has prospered in the last 50 years, and the historical, archaeological, monumental, landscape vocation of the aspiring Syracuse European capital of 2019 culture and already UNESCO heritage of humanity. The project includes 5 steps: territorial animation, the construction of a shared vision, the tourist product, technological innovation and enhancement through communication, marketing, and transferability. The first step is territorial animation aimed at raising awareness of the industrial history of the Syracusan territory and unraveling the dialectic in which the city is mired (between those who are pro and those who are against); the goal is to build a network of local actors to foster a shared vision of the present and future of the industrial center. A technological platform (wiki) will allow those interested to add data, proposals. ITI plans to build 4 itineraries:
1) by train, 50 minutes of poignant contradictions, from burning chimneys to the Saline di Priolo nature reserve, to then connect to the cycle path, with trekking and bike-sharing itineraries both identified by the project and Syracuse classics;
2) The energy routes, with the involvement of the oil factories and the Archimede thermal solar plant;
3) The nature trail, with entities that already operate in the area for the use of the Saline di Priolo Nature Reserve;
4) Archaeological itinerary with guided visits to the two sites of Megara Iblea and Thapsos. With the aid of augmented reality, it will be possible to observe the past, present and future of places.

ROLE IN THE PROJECT:
Territorial animation for the construction of the network of local actors

Capofila: Impact HUB Siracusa

FIL Fest is a festival of Philosophy, Anthropology, Economics and Culture that is proposed as a moment of aggregation and participatory reflection how we can seize the opportunities for happiness to which the state of crisis of our times is pushing us. Through meetings, debates, events, festivals and performances, we develop choral reflections, to trace together individual and collective paths where there is room for what we really like doing and being and … not just having.

2013 Edition – Fair and Sustainable Wellness
The answers to get out of the crisis are imposing a profound revision of the assumptions according to which the economy and above all finance are the only areas on which it is necessary to intervene. Italy, strengthened by a tradition of economic theory that has given value to the question of happiness in its collective dimensions, marks its presence in the international debate. With the work of the CNEL and Istat, which proposed an indicator of Fair and Sustainable Wellbeing (BES), our country was among the first to acknowledge the need to define new dimensions of well-being that do not take into account only the number of goods produced and consumed but of multiple dimensions linked to the quality of life and relationships, access to services, the quality of the environment and that of places and work conditions. More and more well-being calls into question some idea of ​​happiness: against the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) it makes its way and advances the need to reason about Gross Domestic Happiness (FIL* in Italian).

Edition 2014 – Happy cities
The second edition of the FILfest was dedicated to the theme of Happy Cities. The intent is to reconnect us to the all-Italian tradition of public happiness, which has a cultural matrix that is alien to both utilitarianism and declinations in the hedonistic sense of happiness. The experiences of medieval city-states – for example – have marked a fundamental passage in which a way of understanding markets, civil society, work and participation has taken shape. Economic thought in that phase considered cities as places of civilization, where they pursue those civil virtues that allow the construction of human environments in which to be happy together. Starting from this heritage, we wanted to return to reflect on our urban development model, to understand how to enhance a relational heritage capable of determining the well-being of people, in workplaces as well as in social and family life.

2016 Edition – Lands
The FILFest 2016 was a time to reflect on the ways to inhabit the earth and respond to global challenges. Earth is certainly the planet, but at the same time it is the ground on which we rest our feet, it is the territory where our house rises, the land we cultivate, the places from which we start and to which we arrive, our “cultural homelands”, the bonds that we build in the world and make us feel happy because they form the sense of us. For this reason, we like to decline the word in the plural, TERRE (Lands), a way to remember the continuous remodeling of cultures, arts, religions, economic solutions, social bonds, family networks that contribute to making our planet, as well as territories, places, the houses in which we live really livable in the long run.

Edition 2018 – Time
In 2018 the FIL Fest dealt with Time. All-round time. Fixed time, variable time. Time and Money. While the GDP continues to deal with the second (Money), the FIL wants to take care of the first (Time). FIL once again as an alternative possibility to GDP.
Gross Domestic Happiness and Time: Time as a value and as a resource for living happily. Time as a measure of living together and as a precious (and insufficient) resource, as well as a measure of the degree of happiness of a community.

PROGRAM:
MIUR – NOTICE START UP – Presentation of projects to support Start-ups – Contamination Lab Line

 

PARTNERSHIP

Leader: University of Catania (Catania)

Partner: The Hub Sicilia Soc. Coop.

 

 

MACRO-INTERVENTION AREA: Social Innovation

The Contamination Labs are places of contamination that promote the culture of entrepreneurship, innovation and new learning models. The CATANIA CLab is an opportunity to create training, exploratory and generative ideas paths that lead the participants, be they the University (students and teachers), companies or external participating bodies, to the possibility of innovating their skills, in a optics that focuses on the promotion of the culture of entrepreneurship, combining it with the objective of a development of the territory compatible with the vision that led to the birth of Horizon2020 and with the regional strategies of Smart Specialization.
The proposed model attributes a central role to the CATANIA CLab in the creation of those favorable environmental conditions necessary to support economic change. In particular, despite the multiplicity of paths that can be developed, a systemic approach will be adopted that takes into account both the actors of the innovative system and the interdependent relationships between the aforementioned actors aimed at activating learning processes (learning by interacting). The concept of connectivity will, therefore, be highlighted, within which all the processes of development and strengthening of local, national and international networks will be identified, with particular reference to the network constituted by the Italian CLabs.

ROLE IN THE PROJECT:

Impact Hub supports the internationalization activities of CLAB, promoting the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, learning and collaboration