For four years, Codici, in partnership with the Istituto Italiano di Valutazione, was appointed by Fondazione Cariplo to monitor and evaluate the seven winning projects of the 2014 Welfare in Azione (Welfare in Action) grant: a total of 25 initiatives spread throughout the area interested by the activity of Fondazione Cariplo, aiming to reconfigure local welfare as community welfare.

The grant by Fondazione Cariplo had three main objectives:

• the innovation of services, processes, and models to meet the needs of society on the basis of co-producing and co-planning flexible, personalised and multidimensional responses;
• the enhancement and the interconnection of people’s, families’ and local resources in a community perspective;
• the development and empowerment of the system of local governance, open to new and unconventional collaborations and to the participation of citizens.

All awarded projects are developed along these directives. Each gives new form to the relationships between people, and expresses a very distinctive mode of organising and planning, peculiar to the organisations that initiated it and of the values that fostered the union of the various partners involved.

For the process of evaluation, Codici is in communication with the promoting organisations, to allow for the emersion of local knowledge and lessons, to enhance their stories and to avoid acting as a faraway external observer. The aim is to look at these experiences using a common framework, and ‘reading’ them transversally, as connected to each other. Lastly, the assignment by Fondazione Cariplo includes the building of a Community of Practices, a place of discussion for the seven awarded projects to develop new perspectives for generative community welfare.

Codici also edited the publication Prendiamoci un caffè. I luoghi del welfare nel Programma Welfare in Azione (Let’s have a coffee. The places of welfare in the Welfare in Action Program), which is freely downloadable here.

Photo ☉☉ Charles Pétillon Heartbeat installation at Covent Garden using 100,000 balloons. By Scott Anderson. CC BY 2.