Training and educational paths
Knowledge is the way forward to change. Today more than ever, we need authentic knowledge, to avoid simplifications and empty words. Knowledge comes from never feeling fulfilled, from the continuous need to search deeper down. Libera has always been involved in schools, universities, working with young people, alongside teachers, in parishes, with many voluntary associations. This is because today we need education as never before. Education cannot be taught; it can only be learned from the continuous discussion among those who educate in the search for the sharing of the principles, horizons and practices of civil education. You can't educate alone, and you can't educate yourself. We educate and, at the same time, we are educated. In this sense, education is a choral project: we are all educators and we are all educated, no one excluded. We educate together, we establish rules together, we take responsibility together. Together is the keyword of education.
Education and Training
You can only grow if you can dream. DANILO DOLCI
At Education and Training, we chose this phrase to summarize the idea of educational commitment that we nurture, meant as the ability to dream with others in a project of collective change. Training, education, supporting people in participation, with particular reference to young people, are fundamental to support our commitment and the construction of civil practices to counter social injustices, corruption and mafias, for the construction of cohesive contexts, attentive to civil and human growth of individuals in communities. In recent years, Abitare ai margini (Living on the margins), Regoliamoci (Let's regulate, a pun with the meaning of 'Let's get a grip'), Libera lo Sport (Free Sport, a pun with the Association's name) and all the training courses have been the space for materialisation of the education idea, offering schools all the necessary aspects to be a fundamental tool for the building of human beings, citizens, and the construction of cities and communities that intend to develop according to justice, equality, respect for the dignity of people and protection of personal freedoms.
Youth Policies
The area of commitment on Youth Policies is concerned with contributing to the guarantee, promotion and development of responsible, legal and sustainable youth autonomy paths, within the local activities promoted by Libera. This sector works towards support to developing new practices and tools to complement those already existing in local groups, providing broader and more heterogeneous spaces for expression and action for youth centrality. The Youth Policy actions are divided into four main stages associated with specific purposes and corresponding activities. These stages involve meetings and work among young people and their areas of belonging, with activities scheduled throughout the year, and correspond to four actions brought together and explained in four specific activities: Stage 1: The establishment and construction of the working group: Benfatto (Well done), the stages in the four macro-areas Stage 2: Local action and planning: Officine Libere (Free Workshops) Stage 3: The meeting and the leisure/gathering relationship in summer: Appuntamento nazionale dei Giovani di Libera (National Meeting of Libera's Youth sector) Stage 4: Final stage and Benfatto plenary meeting and proposals for the new year.
University and Research
It has the task of structuring, in Italy and abroad, a scientific network of civil engagement actors against mafias and corruption. The activities are mainly developed through structured collaborations with universities, degree courses and individual courses for the realization of seminars, master's degrees, advanced training courses, Summer School Già (Already) for the in-depth study of topics and research-action and also through tutoring and accompaniment to students and researchers for the realization of research on topics of interest. Fifty-four universities join Libera, accounting for about 60% of the <86 universities surveyed in Italy (excluding online Universities). Moreover, several activities are carried out in collaboration with about 10 foreign universities permanently involved in the projects and activities. These Universities do not collaborate solely with the International sector, and their contribution, although not formalized, enjoys the permanent involvement of departments and degree courses. In addition, work is under way to collect and archive projects and dissertation and research projects carried out by students, researchers and professors on the Mafia phenomenon and corruption. It represents a wide archive available for the community to browse and read degree and doctoral dissertations on the topics of legality, corruption, organized mafia-type crime and all initiatives to combat mafia-type and illegal phenomena in general. In addition, after eight years of implementation at the University of Pisa, the Master's Degree in the Analysis, Prevention and Combating of Organized Crime and Corruption has been expanded, with the ambition of reaching an inter-university scope, coordinating the universities of Turin, Pisa, Naples and Palermo, and opening up to closer collaboration also with other universities.
E!State Liberi!
E!State Liberi! (Free your Summer) engagement and training camps on confiscated assets is a project aimed at the enhancement and promotion of the social reuse of assets confiscated and seized from mafias, as well as the training of participants on social anti-mafia issues and knowledge on the areas involved, through a week of field life, immersed in experiences of social commitment and in-depth study. On one hand, E!State Liberi! is outlined as a project of fundamental importance for the realities that manage confiscated and seized assets, since an important contribution in terms of participation and promotion can be directed towards these realities. On the other hand, the real protagonists are the thousands of young people and adults who each summer voluntarily decide to dedicate a week of their holidays to accompany the daily commitment of social cooperatives and associations in the local networks of social anti-mafia.
Remembrance and commitment
Libera Memoria (Libera Remembrance) deals with both keeping alive the memory of the mafias’ innocent victims and walking alongside their relatives, organising debate and training opportunities. To this end, the activity of collecting the testimonies of victims' relatives, as direct witnesses of what happened and who can entrust us with their memories, gives life to a hub serving as starting point to reconstruct the stories of innocent victims. This activity remains one of the sector’s primary objectives. We believe it is essential to build paths that help us develop an idea of ?Remembrance that goes beyond rhetoric and preserves the story of real events that have affected not only the families of the victims, but the entire community. These paths generate a need to think carefully about the role of testimony that makes memory alive and lays the foundations for the transformation of individual memory into collective memory. Likewise, the need to reflect on the possibilities that the theories - underlying the various paths in place on the theme of “reparation” as a tool to “mend” the tear that Mafia violence repeatedly brings to our society - has the same matrix. In this sense, considering the victim as someone to be welcomed and protected, the base idea for the sector's activities throughout the year, leads to the proposal of routes increasingly in line with requirements of European legislation in this field: starting from our experience of meeting with numerous families of innocent victims.
The value of testimony
Libera Memoria, thanks to the generous testimonies of relatives, collects the stories of the mafias’ innocent victims. These are not just individual or family stories: they are the stories of our territories that, united together, tell a piece of the History of our country. Reading and knowing these stories, supporting family members in the process of transforming pain into commitment, demanding truth and justice for all the innocent victims was the responsibility that Libera assumed to build together a public and shared memory. A living memory. In this spirit, Vivi was born, a multimedia archive, open and accessible to all, where all the stories of the mafias’ innocent victims will be collected. A virtual place, accessible free of charge and at any time, where the hundreds of people killed by Mafia violence can be met and found to find out who they were, what work they did, what dreams they had. This is a collective album in which to rediscover the memory of their territories.
