ESC: Orgogliosi volontari per la solidarietà: volontariato in una scuola democratica

Antigóna is a non-profit organization, created in Rastignano (Bologna) on 7.2.2008, on the initiative of five founder members. Its registered office is located in Bologna, Via dello Scalo 10, and its recently opened, operational headquarters is in the same road, Via dello Scalo 6/a. Antigóna aims to achieve the following goals: • to conceive and implement projects of social solidarity, development cooperation and humanitarian aid, in order to permanently improve the living, health and work conditions of the final beneficiaries, strengthening their skills to guarantee sustainability over time for the projects; • to inform, raise awareness, and involve the civil society, especially the youth, about actions aimed at solidarity, enhancing the initiative, the energies and the expressions of volunteering; • to favour the self-directed progress, in social, cultural, technical and economic spheres, of sectors of unprivileged population, also through collaborative relationships with their organizational expressions, and with other subjects involved in development cooperation, at national and international level; • to promote the human growth, the non-formal and intercultural learning, the acquisition of skills and practical experiences, and the professional training of young people motivated to develop social solidarity activities and international development cooperation. To achieve these goals, since its inception Antigóna has privileged a peculiar and very collaborative operating mode, that is: to put the skills that Antigóna and its members have, at the disposal of other organizations that have embarked in a project and find themselves in some kind of difficulty. In other words, Antigóna was born to collaborate with other organizations and support them, helping their projects to overcome temporary difficulties, or to reach a better daily functioning, depending on the case. It is a highly original mission, rarely adopted by other non-profit entities. As a consequence of this mission, Antigóna has always been active in projects of various types, without specializing in any particular theme. We evaluate and choose the collaborations in which to be engaged on the basis of our assessments about: the quality of the project, the adequacy of our competences with respect to it, the empathy with the possible partners with whom we come into contact, and our operative possibilities in that specific moment. Besides the collaborations with other organizations, we also realize projects conceived and managed by ourselves, yet remaining always open to networks with other partners sharing our operating mode. Currently Antigóna is involved in three activities: • a collaboration with an Italian informal group, to support its project in India called "Crumbs of solidarity"; • our own activity related to the "European Solidarity Corps''; • a long-standing social informatics project, called ''The informatic harbour'', to help people in trouble to carry out online administrative procedures. We also have a bunch of other collaborations and projects in evaluation, to be possibly started.