We are deeply grateful to Dr. Emmenegger for guiding us through an inspiring tour of the various workshops at the Primavalle Professional Training Center, where he serves as coordinator.
This is an institute of the ENAIP (Ente Nazionale ACLI Istruzione Professionale), where physically handicapped people, those with mental illness, and marginalized young people work side by side. Many of these young people had completed compulsory schooling only to find no real prospects or had struggled with social integration. The building itself was once a public dormitory, offered to the Center by the City of Rome.
Professional training began in 1989 with the opening of three sectors—printing, art glass, and landscaping—under what became known as the Psychiatric Project. But even before that, staff and trainees had cleaned and repainted the entire building and helped reconstruct the facility's systems from scratch. "We won this place ourselves," they say now, with evident pride.
After the Psychiatric Project came the Disadvantaged Youth Project (computer skills, photography, masonry), a cafeteria cooperative, and FUTURARTE—Italy's first and only cooperative of physically handicapped people dedicated to furniture and art restoration. "We want to avoid becoming a school at all costs," Dr. Emmenegger insists. "We want to remain at the level of 'projects'—that's our fundamental choice." Here, "project" means something quite specific: an activity in constant evolution that offers professional skills to those who undertake it while projecting into the future and reinventing itself continually. The project might be creating a public park in the heart of the neighborhood; it might be international exchanges with workers and young people from similar groups. In recent months, visitors have come from France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Right now, twenty trainees and five staff members are working in Germany. The Center is also considering opening a restaurant in the neighborhood where some cafeteria cooperative members could work, a library, and a course for library assistants. There are plans for work placements outside the Center—for instance, one art glass trainee is apprenticing at the Vatican Museums' Restoration School. The idea emerged when some trainees were restoring stained glass windows at the neighborhood church, delicate work requiring them to disassemble each piece and reconstruct it to original specifications. At the same time, Vatican Museums technicians were restoring exterior mosaics nearby. "A relationship formed, a collaboration," Dr. Emmenegger recalls. "We were interested in their work because they used a lot of glass, and they were interested in ours—stained glass restoration is still quite rare in Italy."
Two of these projects have already become cooperatives: the cafeteria and FUTURARTE, the furniture and art restoration workshop. Their members completed four or five years of training before organizing themselves into integrated cooperatives. Now the teaching falls to them.
"The challenge," Dr. Emmenegger explains, "is that for the people we work with, finding work outside is not simple. It's certainly a possibility, and some will manage it. One or two already have. But many abandon that path and prefer to stay in the project and then organize themselves into cooperatives. A cooperative's purpose is to create jobs for people who receive regular wages.
This transition from project to cooperative begins immediately: during professional training, the trainee already knows that's the goal. From day one, they also understand that the Center's activities are connected to public agencies that fund their work. The European Social Fund finances fifty percent of projects through the Regional government; the Region provides annual and three-year subsidies as required by law 9 for integrated cooperative funding. Collaboration with the local health authority and the city district office is intense. The CIM identifies and monitors people working at the Center; four staff members are full-time secondments from the health authority, and the hope is to increase that number. This will require a different approach, staff say—more qualitative, more thoughtful, more empowering. It will become increasingly clear that providing a subsidy to a handicapped person isn't enough. What's needed is funding for a project on their behalf, planning their future integration broadly, with appropriate tools. What stands out immediately is that the Center offers facilities with special appeal you usually don't find elsewhere—art glass work, for instance, or the public park project.
The land for the park is owned by the IACP (Autonomous Institute for Public Housing). For years it lay abandoned—overgrown with grass, littered with garbage and syringes. The City had tried to intervene without success. "The Institute offered us the land free of charge with one condition," Dr. Emmenegger recalls, "that we make it accessible to the public within three years." Through this work, done in collaboration with the City, the young people are now seen outside, in the neighborhood, as actors and partners—not as dependent welfare recipients.
From the beginning, the ENAIP Center has focused on people's potential rather than their disability.
Medical care hasn't been sidelined (the coordinator is a psychiatrist, some staff are nurses), but what matters first is the social challenge of nurturing the whole person. These individuals, usually marginalized in society, become protagonists here. Through their witness to real values and quality of life, they testify that difference is not a handicap—it can be a richness, an opportunity to do new things, useful things. Everyone, from shopkeepers to politicians, can understand that the work happening at the Center is work meant to expand outward and enrich relationships. Of course, managing this isn't simple; it can stir fear and misunderstanding. "Our first meetings with schools," Dr. Emmenegger says, "were marked by anxieties: Will they be dangerous? These questions still surface sometimes, but they're absurd ideas with no basis in reality. True, our presence disrupts—but it can transform the old assumptions and moral and social judgments some people hold. For example: when we started work on this park, we went all over the neighborhood asking for help and explaining the vision. We asked the Primavalle schools for support, and our trainees often became promoters and even teachers there. In December we invited students to the park site and asked for drawings and ideas. Now we're working with a first-year middle school class, analyzing nearly three hundred drawings we collected to develop a concrete proposal for the park. We want the neighborhood and especially young people to participate in this project.
Through this initiative—one I find beautiful and deeply productive—attitudes and opinions have shifted. Our people are no longer seen as part of the project "for the crazy"—now they're "from the park." The phrase "Oh, you're one of the park people!" carries a special quality and meaning for all of us.
This profoundly changes our young people's motivation. It invites them to move, to step outside themselves, to take risks and remain open."
- Natalia Livi, 1991