The “local integration tutor” in Brescia
The “local integration tutor” is an individual or a group of people (local associations or cooperatives), that “adopts” a path of social and economic integration, making available their relational and professional resources through a progressively closer relationship with the beneficiary. The initative started in 2018 in the city and district of Brescia, Italy.
The experience of these years shows how integration paths generally require more time and additional services than those offered by the reception system. As an answer to this need, as well as to the increasing complexity growing in actual and stable social integration paths, this activity aims to experiment with new forms and practices of reception, communication and interaction between asylum seekers/refugees, migrants, and host society, focusing also on the issue of the quality of social relationships in which a migrant is entered and his/her ability to move autonomously into the hosting society.
This positive experimentation was implemented through the AMIF project “ANCORA” (Project 308 – evaluated by the Italian Ministry of the Interior as “best practice” and case study https://www.adl-zavidovici.eu/2019/01/29/parma-presentati-risultati-del-progetto-ancora/) on the territories of 4 different Italian regions in 2018 and is successfully continuing since then.
Volunteers joining this project are periodically trained about legal and administrative procedure for asylum application, the reception system, and the values of giving time and personal networks to refugees welcoming them into societies in such an intimate way.
Since 2018, 3 training courses for around 100 volunteers had been promoted by ADL Zavidovici and around 60 volunteers are active in their path with refugees. Due to Covid-19 restrictions we continued the 2020 activities with online meetings.
The outcome of this activity is the creation of a social network around the migrant person, through a mentoring scheme where local volunteers, duly trained and coached, accompany for a continuous period of time the migrant in his/her progressive familiarization with the hosting society and his/her acquaintance with the local culture.
To get an idea of the type of relation we aim at creating, here are some videos produced by ADL Zavidovici with the local integration tutors and their accompanied migrants: https://youtu.be/fs94KF7BvdM