Turin is home to a significant number of minors placed in residential educational communities, coming from both Italian and international backgrounds shaped by marginalisation and limited opportunities for personal development. For these young people, educational pathways that build real skills, encourage responsibility and support genuine social inclusion matter more than most.
Italy's rate of young people not in education, employment or training is among the highest in Europe, a gap driven in part by a real mismatch between schooling and the job market, felt most sharply by young people who leave residential care at the age of majority with few concrete prospects. Offering them training experiences tied to real work opportunities addresses that gap directly.
The project
Pro Cooking runs training workshops in a dedicated teaching kitchen, where teenagers learn to make jams and preserves, working through every stage of the production process themselves. The aim is to give these young people a concrete, hands-on route towards the world of work, built on experiential learning rather than theory alone, preparing them for social and professional inclusion once they leave residential care.
Presentation and tasting events open the workshop's products up to the wider neighbourhood, giving local residents a direct, tangible encounter with the young people's work and helping spread a culture of inclusion across the area.
Who the project is for
The project's direct beneficiaries are the 16 minors the residential community hosts at any given time.
Its impact reaches further, to the 14 educators and 30 volunteers who can build structured training into their everyday educational work, and to local residents, who gain greater awareness of inclusion through the tasting events organised around the workshop's products.
Project name: PRO COOKING
Proposing organisation: ASSOCIAZIONE PRO INFANZIA APS ETS
Area of intervention: Inclusion & Social Development
Country: Italy