On 5 October, during the international conference “Decent Work, Equity and Inclusion: Passwords for the Present and the Future” – organised by the University of Padua in collaboration with several international partners – the symposium “Improving the quality of work in communities: an interdisciplinary research to grow and help others grow” was held. The Paoletti Foundation made an important contribution by presenting a psychopedagogical study, carried out in partnership with the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology of Sapienza University of Rome, on the training of staff of non-profit organisations that run reception services for minors at risk of social marginalisation.
Besides Tania Di Giuseppe, head of the Paoletti Foundation’s psychopedagogical research; Elena Perolfi, head of the project Higher School of Pedagogy for the Third Millennium; Grazia Serantoni, psychologist and researcher at Sapienza University of Rome; and Lara Sgobbi, head of residential services for minors at the Fondazione Albero della Vita Onlus, Patrizio Paoletti also took the floor with a personal contribution.
Paoletti underlined that the event was “an important moment of shared dialogue on one of the most important themes of this historical moment for our social structure: we must accept a challenge today, and it is the challenge of inclusion. Inclusion can only appear where a new understanding arises, an understanding that is not the simple product of individual work, but the manifestation of a context that generates a movement within the community that inhabits it: a movement towards that leap in awareness that makes us able to leave the I in favour of the we and, through this we that is produced, to meet the other than ourselves, understood as expanded awareness that sees us as being – as individuals – part and – as part – together.”
On the last day of the conference a Manifesto for Inclusion was also presented. The Paoletti Foundation helped draft it, in collaboration with internationally renowned figures working in education, lifelong learning, economics, counselling and other fields.
The idea behind Paoletti’s contribution to the Manifesto is that inclusive and sustainable growth is no longer just a desirable goal for our future but an urgent necessity, because it is directly linked to peace, which must start first of all “from ourselves and our inner world”.
The capacity to be inclusive is “a neurological process. It is the ability of the human brain to reorganise the data in its possession for aims higher than personal ones, an inclusive-selective process that must see the other, the different, as someone who can not only be welcomed but also nurtured, so as to be set free in their productive capacity.”
