Dossier n. 256/2016 [Abstract] I Saggi. A House for community health

The aim of the Dossier is to highlight and document the processes implemented within the regional project Community Lab; this is the first of a series of monographs.

As explained in the Introduction, Community Lab is a path that has experimented a method to innovate public policies and collective processes, focusing in particular on social and health programming and accompanying territories in the development of innovative processes.

The social and aggregative Centre I Saggi (The wise) is one of the cases encountered and accompanied within this path. Due to its characteristics, this Centre represent a unique and interesting experience to promote the development of the community, the co-management of services and health promotion; for this purpose it involves different social and institutional actors.

The attempt in this publication is to describe the Centre in its current configuration, considering it as one of the possible “states” of a dynamic and vital reality, and to present the process of construction and development of this participative model, essential part of the experience.

The first part of the volume deals with the analysis of the Center I Saggi within the context in which it has developed over the years, to fully understand the history, purpose, organization and projects. The second part is a detailed assessment of achievements in terms of process, product, outcome and impact; the evaluation was carried out through surveys, focus groups and quantitative analysis. The final Chapter focuses on I Saggi’s strengths, considered as capacity to generate resources, community work and a new way of doing volunteer work; the authors also try to highlight the elements of preciousness of this experience and its replicability in other contexts.

The analysis and evaluation on the experience of I Saggi was also meant to produce a narrative that can be memory for those who attended the courses, reporting for those who have invested personal and collective resources, information for those intrigued to replicate this particular “experiment”.

The Centre I Saggi was called a “House for community health”, recognizing it as a community project, a bottom-up model that represents - for the municipality and its population - a place producing health in which the participation of the community affects the health production in that area, thus strengthening the health of individuals and of the community as a whole.