Le imprese di comunità come strumento di welfare rurale

Italian community co-operatives and their agency role in sustainable community development.

“…These are bottom-up initiatives from members of the interested communities who decide to take action for economic and social empowerment (Phillips & Pittman, 2015). The output of these processes of community development is the collective action to respond to multiple issues and/or take advantage of diverse opportunities (Mori & Sforzi, 2018). Co-operatives explicitly work to maximise what has been called "the co-operative advantage for community development" (Vieta & Lionais, 2015, p. 2) As the findings show, community co-operatives have a wide perspective on their communities, local economies, and territories.…”

“…On the economic side, community co-operatives aim to create a "community economy" (Wilkinson & Quarter, 1996) that favours the economic growth of local actors through mutual benefit, avoiding exploitative dynamics. Community co-operatives work to make local assets useful and at the service of both residents and other businesses in a perspective of mutual support and cohabitation in the same area (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003;Mori & Sforzi, 2018). Generally, the new cooperativism wave prefigures the creation of local collective economic actors who are able to develop assets and means of production free from a profit-oriented and exploitative logic (Vieta, 2018).…”

“…How they achieve their mission and goals are various. They operate in different sectors and generate benefits for the well-being of their communities, considering all the residents as potential beneficiaries of their co-operative advantage (Mori & Sforzi, 2018).…”

“…The Italian co-operative movement has witnessed a dual phase of the new cooperativism wave: in the late 1980s, the rise of the social co-operative model as a new way to organise local social services (Borzaga & Galera, 2016); then, the emergence of a new model devoted to fostering community development processes through a variety of services in both rural and urban areas (e.g., agriculture, cultural activities, environment protection, food service, tourism). These have been called "community cooperatives" (Bianchi, 2021b;Mori & Sforzi, 2018) and demonstrate that the co-operative model is adaptable to the community development process. This is a bottom-up process that groups of citizens, organisations or public institutions can use to achieve various objectives related to community wellbeing (Phillips & Pittman, 2015).…”