The Family Sharing project was conceived and implemented by the Social Cooperative il Margine, born from the overcoming of psychiatric asylum and operates in the social health, educational, social inclusion, active labor policies, local development.

Family Sharing is the first mutual-foster project between families in a state of fragility and represents an innovative system of foster family, day or residential: it provides support between two families who are going through a period of difficulty, but who can help each other to overcome them.

The innovative and meaningful idea of the project is just “reciprocity”: even if families are going through a period of difficulty (they need help), they may still want to share their resources with another family (they can be of help). Each family will then have the opportunity to receive practical help in relation to its own needs, but at the same time to respond to the needs of the other.

Families are therefore no longer a taxable person receiving aid defined by others, but become an active part of a process of union, cohesion and sharing.

Family Sharing is part of the logic of social co-design through the instrument of “horizontal subsidiarity”. The principle that supports the intervention is that the service is not “provided”, but co-projected together with the beneficiary families. Families thus have the opportunity to live the experience of “becoming a resource” for another family, enhancing their social image (the family internalizes a positive image of itself) and activating a virtuous process capable of operating a cultural inversion of perspective: from model caregiver-care receiver (family Competent family-Disagiata family) with peer support model.

The project is aimed at families in the east of Turin with particular reference to peripheral areas, but can be inserted in any territorial context.

The project then sees the first phase of identification of families, which follows a path of support/ mentoring by a dedicated operator (family coach, with the function of matching facilitator), whose intervention will gradually reduce, until being completely absorbed thanks to a virtuous regenerative process activated by the interaction between the two families (which will be followed for a period of follow-up).

After periods of arrest due to Covid, Family Sharing has been active since June 2021: some beneficiary families have already been contacted and the first exploratory talks have been made through a careful evaluation of the mutual resources and needs, conduct of the psychologists of the cooperative The Margin.

The Covid has necessarily made it appropriate to reshape the project that is now going on in a slightly different way from how it was designed, because it is necessary to identify the new needs and new fragilities that emerged during the pandemic and it is also necessary to give different answers because it was not possible to work exclusively on proximity and meeting, which was a bit the focus of the project, the cooperative had to reinvent some partially different operating modes.

Watch the new video of the project to learn more.

Da Capo is part of the 15 generative welfare projects of Torino Social Factory program of the City of Turin, co-funded by the National Metropolitan City Operational Program and the European Union, European Social Fund, made as part of Torino Social Impact.

For more information on the Torino Social Factory program and the other 14 projects that are part of it go to this link.