Innovazione sociale e benessere della comunità: il caso di studio “Summer School di Arti Performative e Community Care” in Salento

In this paper, we present a model of training-research-intervention whose purpose is to trigger community activation processes for the promotion of community empowerment and capabilities to favour development and social innovation. The model is called ACL (Action Community Learning) and consists of a complex narrative-performative device, born from experiences primarily arising in the Summer School of Performing Arts and Community Care, which has been held for the last four years in the communities of the Salento region, by the university spinoff EsperO - born in 2009 around the chair of Experimental Education in University of Salento - , which carries out applied research in the field of experiential and outdoor education. One component, essential and distinctive of the social innovation, is to have its pin in relational ties of people, and in their emerging needs, or those already emerged but not yet satisfied. Therefore it makes sense to talk about social innovation, mainly in territorial situations characterized by unmet needs, wasted resources, environmental emergencies and / or social. Social innovation is not only to find innovative responses to the needs, but it is: find innovative answers managing to draw novel ways of decision and action, which are based on a functioning of reticular and non-hierarchical interactions, the full involvement and participation of the social actors, on the definition of new social roles, on the increase in value of material and human resources under-utilized, or those that are not recognized as such. The results of social innovation are therefore always necessarily, social results. It's fundamental: cooperation, contamination between pluralities, the imagination and the collective creativity, dissemination and sharing of practices. The impact of social innovation is much more meaningful and effective if the process of community involvement is truly inclusive. We add that all this must be developed within a horizon of sustainability, both process and results. Sustainability does not refer to purely economic aspects; but the sustainability is environmental, social and cultural sustainability. I would stress the importance of these adjectives, as they are crucial to the social researcher who wants to build models of intervention in favor of social innovation: attention is required to safeguard the reproducibility of community ties. Reproducibility of community ties mean existence and maintenance, within a given territorial context, of the conditions so that individuals have trust in each other, cooperate with each other, are inscribed in a plot, rich enough and recursive, of interrelations among members of their own community, to share horizons common and easily reach agreements on common goals. ACL model tries to act in this direction.

In questo saggio presentiamo un modello di formazione-ricerca-intervento la cui finalità è quella di innescare processi di attivazione comunitaria per la promozione di empowerment e capabilities comunitari, in un’ottica di sviluppo e innovazione sociale. Il modello si chiama ACL (Action Community Learning) ed è un dispositivo narrativo-performativo complesso, nato dall’esperienza maturata principalmente nella Summer School di Arti Performative e community care, che realizziamo da quattro anni nelle comunità del territorio salentino, con lo spinoff universitario EspérO, nato nel 2009 attorno alla cattedra di Pedagogia Sperimentale dell’Università del Salento, che realizza ricerca applicata nel campo della formazione esperienziale e outdoor.