The SFA, Il Seme's autonomy training service for young people with disabilities, exists to offer real educational activities and to accompany each young person as they build their own life plan. The aim is to spread a culture where the other person is seen as someone to share thoughts and ideas with, learning to look, listen and do things together, moving past both the stereotypes attached to disability and the pity that so often comes with them.
Ongoing dialogue with local social services, and comparison with similar organisations, shaped a space designed specifically to help young people take on the challenge of pushing past their own limits, looking to the future with real awareness and responsibility.
The project
Dire Fare Baciare adds music therapy, yoga, painting and a creative lab to the programme, giving young people new, more complete ways to understand and experience their own body and their relationships with others. Each pathway is built around the individual's own capabilities, interests and aspirations, aiming for the greatest possible autonomy and, where skills allow, real participation in society and the world of work.
Inclusion here means creating the conditions for young people to do things with others and for others, not simply alongside them. Autonomy, offering the tools to make independent choices; social inclusion, treating the space as a daily meeting point where authentic relationships turn diversity into a shared value; and responsibility, understanding that one's own contribution genuinely matters to a shared project, run through the whole programme.
Who the project is for
The project currently supports 9 participants, with 2 more expected to join from September, alongside their families. Throughout the year, additional young people are also referred for work placements by local vocational training centres, and secondary schools with a social studies focus send their own students to train through direct, hands-on field experience.
Project name: DIRE FARE BACIARE
Proposing organisation: cooperativa sociale Il Seme Cooperativa sociale
Area of intervention: Inclusion & Social Development
Country: Italy