Fo.Co. takes the training of the “actors” involved in reception projects very seriously.

From years of experience and commitment in such projects, the WELCOME model was created — Well-being, Everyday Life and Co-Management for Empowerment — a document that provides the theoretical, ethical, and operational framework underlying all of the Cooperative’s educational projects.

In Cosenza, on Thursday, June 4, as part of the dissemination events linked to the FAMI PROG-36 “Sarepta” project, under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund 2021/2027, of the Ministry of the Interior, co-funded by the European Union, the first of three training days dedicated to the WELCOME model was held as a methodological reference, from its guiding principles to its application in everyday practice.

Specifically, the target audience for the first day included project managers, social workers, educators, and operators involved in the Cooperative’s projects.

The aim was not simply the transmission of procedures, but the construction of a shared professional outlook: one capable of combining methodological rigor, relational quality, and educational responsibility.

Among the topics addressed during the day were the primacy of the individual person over administrative categories, the intersectional reading of needs without identity-based distortions, the rejection of culturalization and pathologization, the role of the everyday educational relationship as a privileged space for the emergence of vulnerability, the operational meaning of documentary, employment-related, and community-based empowerment; the distinction between reflective supervision and case management, and the centrality of organizational and accounting correctness as an ethical — not bureaucratic — condition for the continuity of projects.

The WELCOME model is based on a vision of education understood as the opening of human possibilities, not as domestication. The person welcomed into a Fo.Co. project is accompanied toward responsible freedom: the greatest possible autonomy compatible with safety, respect for the rights of others, and the sustainability of the project itself. The educational relationship is affectionate and real, but professionally regulated: closeness without possession, affection without fusion, containment without taking life captive.

The FAMI PROG-36 “Sarepta” project has been active since August 2023 and welcomes 50 UAMs, Unaccompanied Foreign Minors, in the facilities of Cosenza, at the S.M. delle Vergini Institute, and Cariati (CS), at the city’s Archiepiscopal Seminary.

The day represented an important moment in the development of the internal professional culture of the Cooperative, consistent with Fo.Co.’s founding principles: the credibility of the educational project is measured not by the docility it achieves, but by the sustainable freedom it makes possible.