A community of "bad teachers." An open, welcoming community made up of women and men, some in wheelchairs and some on their feet, some in need of help and others eager to give it. A community capable of acting concretely on both the personal struggles of its members—assistance, schooling, medical costs, transportation—and the social issues that leave so many indifferent: disability, suffering, incarcerated minors, peace, resistance to organized crime, addiction to alcohol and drugs, the common good.
Comunità Progetto Sud knows how to see life on a grand scale. Founded in 'ndrangheta territory in 1976 by Don Giacomo Panizza—a worker priest who emigrated backward, from Brescia to Lamezia Terme—the community received high recognition last February when President Sergio Mattarella bestowed upon him the honor of the Republic. Ombre e Luci had already met with Don Panizza to hear about his ideas and mission. His social interventions focus on disability, addiction, and migration, carried out through centers (some established in buildings seized from criminal organizations) and service offices run by this extraordinary network in Calabria, particularly in Lamezia Terme.
Founded 47 years ago as a self-managed group to offer an alternative to the "deportation" of disabled Calabrians to institutions in northern Italy—"Instead of having people emigrate elsewhere to find daily assistance or beg for the services they needed, we created them ourselves, here in Calabria"—the community has grown steadily.
Today it is an independent nonprofit that maintains its base in Lamezia and, beyond people with disabilities, stands alongside those struggling with addiction, immigrants, Roma, people with AIDS, minors, and women in crisis. Progetto Sud functions as a network of networks, working daily to provide concrete answers for social inclusion while pursuing justice, equality, and the rule of law.
"There is still so much to do in Calabria," Don Panizza explains. "We have one-fifth the services available in Campania and one-twentieth of those in Lombardy. But what has changed in these territories since the beginning is a cultural shift in mindset: we don't work on people with disabilities. We work with them."
"From the start, we at Comunità Progetto Sud sought to bring disabled people out of their isolation," he continues. Men and women shut away at home, cast aside—and when they finally stepped out, they were reborn. They understood they were great, and they understood they were children of God. Here, a person with a disability learns that what matters is not so much receiving as giving. Understanding that you're not necessarily beautiful, talented, or perfect—but like everyone else, you have both abilities and limitations."
Among Don Panizza's various programs addressing disability—including a rehabilitation center, a psycho-educational center for autism, and an information office run by a person with disability—there is the residential home Dopo di Noi (After Us), directed by educator Elvira Benincasa. Opened in 2009 in a building confiscated from the mafia, it provides housing for people with physical or mental disabilities. These are people without family or whose parents can no longer care for them. The home offers round-the-clock residential care marked by a family atmosphere and clear rules of coexistence, respect, and welcome. The residents, currently between 50 and 74 years old, bring their own stories. Days unfold not in isolation: individual plans and therapeutic protocols structure the routine, alongside ordinary family rhythms. Some residents go to the gym, others engage in activities in the community, some prepare lunch and then visit the barber in the afternoon, call on neighbors, or ride the equipped minibus. Summer vacations are organized too—in the mountains of Sila or along the Ionian and Tyrrhenian coasts.
During the COVID lockdown, the residential home reinvented itself, implementing organizational plans and targeted actions to prevent illness and counter the closure of outside activities. "Dopo di Noi draws life from daily relationships with the community and neighborhood where it exists," Benincasa explains. "Isolation could have pushed our residents back into the marginalization they experienced in their youth or at other points in their lives. But through group activities, creativity, and conversation, our staff worked to fill each day with meaning—maintaining physical distance while never allowing emotional or psychological distance to grow."
Don Panizza reflects on the meaning of community itself. "The word 'community' is variable in meaning. Every time we use it, we have to qualify it depending on whether we're talking about a closed or open community, unified or fragmented, segregated, criminal, religious, sectarian, or inclusive. There's a difference between pointing to a group that is equal, free, and democratic versus a place where people are institutionalized, isolated, and stripped of liberty. The first kind promotes human flourishing. The second resembles warehouses for 'throwaway lives.' We could technically call almost any social grouping a community—geographic territories or civil spaces, open or fenced, natural or imposed aggregations, shared feelings of belonging or virtual spaces. But I had no doubt about this one: Comunità Progetto Sud established itself as a community of welcome that practices genuine sharing."
To reflect on what community life means is to see this project—born and grown in the deepest peripheries—pooling resources, both goods and hardships, relationships and futures. It gives voice and agency to the excluded, the vulnerable, who are no longer merely assisted. They are no longer merely assisted because they have finally become protagonists of their own lives. This is Comunità Progetto Sud's strength—and the secret to its longevity: it regards the other, others, not as "incomplete citizens" but as persons.
As mentioned, beyond the centers there are, like Russian nesting dolls, numerous projects within Comunità Progetto Sud. Most recently, Resto in campo (I Stay in the Field), which works concretely against labor trafficking in Calabrian farmland, guaranteeing migrants and others far from home honest, legal work with real, serious contracts. There is also work against violence toward women, attention to the youngest, support for families and parents of vulnerable children living in a region where institutional services are absent or inadequate. All of this responds to the complacency surrounding Don Panizza, who underscores something crucial. "We can disturb the present by pointing toward horizons, by calling people to take bigger steps—often against the current." Yes, you can. You can create a community where the status quo is overturned, where people, as people, are placed at the center of things and the world.