Sport is a right for everyone, but practicing it safely requires mandatory medical check-ups. That’s why, alongside the launch of the social inclusion and anti-educational-poverty activities we run in the Kalsa neighborhood, our Association has enabled forty-five children from the neighborhood to get a medical check-up, thanks to support from the 8×1000 funds of the Tavola Valdese.
A community health outreach service that offers a concrete response to a need — often left unheard — of a community that faces serious conditions of marginalization every day.
For more than ten years we have worked in Palermo’s Kalsa neighborhood on social inclusion and against educational poverty, also offering health support to families facing economic hardship, so as to monitor young people’s health and ensure access to fundamental rights.
We are convinced that it is not enough to support shopkeepers and business owners in reporting extortion if, at the same time, strategies and interventions are not directed toward removing the conditions of decay and poverty that help fuel deviance and widespread illegality.
Without work, without a roof over one’s head, with a right to health that is shrinking for many, and a school dropout rate that keeps rising, criminal phenomena and widespread illegality are bound to persist and remain a kind of “social safety net.”
For this reason, since 2012, in the Kalsa neighborhood, our association has worked with children and families to remove conditions of decay and improve access to fundamental rights, helping to build concrete alternatives to crime and widespread illegality.
What Addiopizzo does in the Kalsa
School support programs at the Association’s headquarters, a property confiscated from the mafia, which has also become the place where medical check-ups are held and which, during the pandemic, was turned into a vaccination hub, allowing hundreds of people who otherwise would not have had access to the vaccine to be vaccinated. Sports inclusion activities in the neighborhood to keep young people away from the temptation of a life of crime; urban regeneration and exploration projects that capture the need and desire to change perspective, to move beyond the boundaries of a neighborhood that is a source of joy and pride, but that can sometimes turn into a dead end for the young people who grow up in the Kalsa and find themselves having to live alongside neglect and abandonment.
The Kalsa remains a place full of potential, but it is also one of the neighborhoods where the lack of job opportunities remains one of the most serious problems — one we also try to address by launching job-placement paths for young people, who can in this way learn a trade at businesses and companies within Addiopizzo’s network.
