Women, migrants and young people: what are the best projects for a more inclusive society?

In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, building an inclusive and supportive society is not only a desirable goal, but an urgent necessity. Inclusion and solidarity are the fundamental pillars to ensure a civil, just and sustainable coexistence, capable of valuing each individual in their uniqueness. An inclusive society is a society that welcomes and values ​​diversity . Whether it is cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual orientation or physical and cognitive abilities, every person has the right to be respected and to find a space where they can fully express themselves. Promoting inclusion means breaking down the barriers - physical, social and cultural - that still exclude millions of people from full participation in social and economic life.

The aim of the Unipolis Foundation

And this is exactly what Fondazione Unipolis , the corporate foundation of the Unipol Group, is doing. After last year's success, it is renewing its commitment with the launch of the new ACT Call - Aspire. Involve. Transform , an initiative in line with the new three-year Strategic Plan 2024-2026 and aimed at projects aimed at promoting a more inclusive and supportive society. With a total allocation of 400 thousand euros, the call is aimed at Third Sector organizations and other entities committed to fighting inequalities, promoting sustainable mobility and improving welfare.

The main purpose of the Call is to support the most vulnerable people, facilitating access to opportunities, autonomy and rights, thus contributing to the creation of active and inclusive citizenship. The objective is to encourage the protagonism of young people, the integration of migrants and the promotion of gender equality .

The three areas of activity

To achieve these goals, the Foundation is committed to three areas of activity, which correspond to the categories in which the call is divided:

- Inequalities : support for projects that combat educational, economic and social disparities, promoting growth and autonomy paths. Priority will be given to initiatives that encourage equal opportunities in the field of youth employment, the right to study and training, and gender issues;

- Mobility : support for proposals that increase awareness of road risks and rules, promote its shared use to improve everyone's life (especially the most vulnerable), create digital and physical infrastructures for road safety;

- Welfare : financing of projects that respond to new social needs, improving psycho-physical well-being and access to social and health services for those who have access difficulties (social, economic, cultural, geographical-territorial barriers). Unipolis also intends to support projects to combat the birth rate and support active aging.

And to understand where the idea for the call came from, who the projects are mostly aimed at among women and migrants and how to stop the phenomenon of declining birth rates, we interviewed the director of Fondazione Unipolis Marisa Parmigiani who also revealed the next objectives to Luce!

How the ACT Call Works - Aspire. Involve. Transform

Where did the idea to launch the call Aspire. Involve. Transform, which already has its objective clear in its name, come from?

“Last year, the Unipolis Foundation defined and adopted a new three-year plan through which it also modified its mission, highlighting a direct commitment to the most vulnerable. With the current plan, the Foundation considered it important, given the situation in our country, to take on a less research-based role and a more direct role towards the creation of utility and value for the final beneficiaries. It therefore identified support for the most vulnerable as the macro priority and divided it into three areas: welfare, mobility and inequalities. The underlying element is to give money to entities that work directly with the most vulnerable to support them in achieving their own autonomy. Why a call for tenders? A call for tenders because our country has a very lively, very rich third sector. So the call for tenders helps us to move beyond the relational dimension. That is, to open up the possibility of accessing these resources to a greater number of entities. It is a call for tenders that does not want to induce the construction of ad hoc projects but wants to be a provider for projects that have been thought out and that are in the core of the organizations. This is the reason why we are quite vague in call, we are very open. What we ask is more in the characteristics of the project. A project that must have an idea of ​​impact. So we ask to give us the logical framework to understand if they are clear about what kind of impact it will produce on the beneficiaries. It must be a project that then lasts and builds through our resources something that then remains. These are resources that are used precisely to start activities that can then be carried out and supported independently by the organization. These are the main characteristics of our call that we want to respond to the dual idea of ​​being transparent and accessible to the third sector on the one hand and on the other to support the durability of the latter's action".

Last year you saw the participation of 565 projects, an excellent response from our country. How proud are you of all this and how many do you expect this year?

“It made us proud because they came from all over Italy from very different organizations, with very different dimensional levels, organizational types, and use of volunteers. And this is certainly an added value. This year, however, we expect less because we think that after having seen who was selected the year before, perhaps there is an automatic reduction in projects that are not exactly in focus. Last year, for example, even though we reiterated that there had to be a direct impact on the final beneficiary, we were still presented with projects that were perhaps more research-based. I think that those types of projects eliminate themselves, that they go looking for resources elsewhere. As a Foundation, we hope and count on the quality of the projects. The other issue with the latter is perhaps that they are very local based. In the sense that we prefer interventions that are very targeted. The more widespread projects, more territorially articulated, risk being less effective. In fact, we also selected smaller organizations that worked with perfect knowledge of the context in which they operated.”

Women and migrants: projects that photograph the situation in Italy

Let's give you a general overview. Last year, many of the winning projects were about young women, mothers, pregnant women , a symptom of greater attention for these figures in Italy. Do you think that this year many of the projects will still be about these situations?

“Who knows. It is certainly an issue. In our country, demography is an institutional, political, national and economic emergency. We really have a problem with how we create the conditions so that parenthood is not a difficult moment to face alone. If we had to say which welfare issues are priorities, they would certainly be parenthood, especially in the early years of life, and that of the elderly. They are two sides of the same coin of demographic changes. Why have we supported and hope to support projects on young parents again this year? Because we believe it is important to bet on future generations.”

In this sense, have migrants “gone out of fashion”?

“No, on the contrary. In fact, if we had two winning projects aimed at women with children, we also had two aimed at migrants. Among other things, one that we bet on is that of a very small organization in Puglia that operates in Cerignola and that deals with a truly significant topic. How we guarantee minimum health services to migrants. It is a topic that somehow brings together inequality and welfare. The other view of migrants that we selected is because they are the invisible ones. That is, they are the kids who arrive alone. Who as long as they are minors are still within a system of protection. The problem is that when they turn eighteen they are abandoned to themselves. If we drive our eighteen-year-old children to school, they think that they are independent in managing not only their own lives but also the very complicated bureaucratic issues related to them.”

How to stop the phenomenon of low birth rates and social barriers towards the LGBT+ community

You also support projects to combat the low birth rate . According to an estimate, 2025/2026 will open with over 134 thousand fewer students in school. How can we stop this phenomenon that seems unstoppable?

"The phenomenon is truly complex and requires a plurality of actors to collaborate and cooperate so that it can even be adequately analyzed and understood. We still need to understand the processes and their reasons."

How can we instead stop the barriers that hinder the LGBT+ community?

“They stop with a lot of awareness and a lot of culture. We are a country that is still behind in terms of cohabitation between bearers of different visions and interests. All in all, we have a dominant cultural matrix and therefore we need to work on this. In reality, I believe that an important part of this work must be done by culture understood in the broad sense. From the Sanremo Festival to the television talk show. In the sense that we must talk to people. We do not necessarily have to educate, but we must bring to life the message of equality in diversity and therefore of equity in rights. I believe that this thing must be felt more than explained. And I believe that art can have a role because it can work on the emotional part of people rather than exclusively on the rational one.”

A look to the future

Your work to create a more supportive and fair society is a daily, everyday job. What are your next goals?

“We have two challenging objectives of two projects that we are about to release. The first on migrants who are the heart of our project on mobility. We would like to support the path of autonomy in mobility and education on road safety of migrants. This is challenging in the sense that autonomy in mobility is the key to building economic autonomy and independence of people. So we believe it is an enabling factor in their integration processes. We will work with UNHCR to intercept people. It is not easy given their short-term priorities to bring training courses on board. The second challenge is to bring more access to health in internal areas especially for the elderly populations, that is, those who have more difficulty moving. Here our ability to make telemedicine courses accessible will be very important. This is also a great challenge in the sense that there is certainly a need, a strong need to monitor health in the less accessible areas. We have experienced years and years of desertification of the health offer. We cannot think of solving it by building hospitals. Today in Italy telemedicine exists but it is very little used compared to other countries because even in this case, from some points of view, there is a cultural legacy. We use the internet a lot but in reality we are not very digitalized in fundamental services. Ultimately, we will work once again with the most fragile because in this sense the elderly on the issue of digitalization are among them".