“Innovating means taking the risk of experimenting with new models of intervention, which demonstrate the effective possibility of transformation and change. The Casa Comune will be the first example in Naples of co-housing for young people with autism. Thanks to Guber Banca's vision and ability to experiment with innovative financial models, people living in different cities and regions of the country will be able to participate in the realization of this important result for fragile people living in Naples. A socially necessary initiative will become the shared project of a large, national community, united by the awareness that everyone has the right to find their place in the world":
said Renato Quaglia, director of the FOQUS Foundation.
FOQUS Spanish Quarter Foundation onlus, chaired by Rachel Furfaro and directed by Renato Quaglia, manages a large pUrban, social and educational regeneration program in the fragile district of the historic center of Naples.
Inside the sixteenth-century ex-monastery, which he has restored and re-functionalized, FOQUS has inaugurated a nursery, primary and secondary schools, houses training institutions, businesses and productive activities that have triggered a profound process of change of one the most difficult neighborhoods in Europe (here live the 10% of children from all over Naples and there are very high rates of unemployment, marginalization and social problems).
Since 2013, the project has created 168 new jobs and brought more than 400 children and young people to school. The intervention promoted over the years by the Foundation, without public contributions but only with private and international support, envisages networking, networking and co-production practices between all the established subjects, different in terms of missions and identities, but active in a shared context, which allows strong correlations between the skills and the specializations that inhabit it. The network of companies participating in FOQUS constitutes a cluster of interconnected subjects, coordinated by the work and connections offered by the Quartieri Spagnoli Foundation. The Foundation guarantees coherent governance for the establishment of a group of companies and entities able to determine together, albeit in the autonomy and individual responsibility of the tasks, a project with a common goal of social emancipation for the more than 35,000 people who live in the quarter.
In 2016 FOQUS inaugurated Argo, a qualification center for children, teenagers, young people with disabilities and their families. The Argo project integrates specialist activities aimed at improving the individual and social skills of users, thanks to an integrated and personalized intervention model and the skills of a multi-professional team, with specific training in view of future employment.
