March 8, from Scampia proposals and actions for women

Chikù Multicultural Center and Econido: Experiences of work inclusion, participation, and social network strengthening as guides for community action.

Autonomy, work and conciliation with life and maternity times. We have been living in the debate for years in view of March 8th where the usual data on the gap between men and women in terms of income, work, care spaces and managerial roles are re-proposed.

Chi Roma e... chi non, together with the social enterprise La Kumpania, is relaunching these issues, building on the processes established over the past 20 years. This is happening in the northern suburbs of Naples, like Scampia, where education, unemployment, and income levels represent a significant divide within the city itself, along with other suburbs.

The multicultural center Chikù, with La Kumpania, has been working on social and work inclusion since 2010 with a group of Neapolitan and Roma women who have begun to reclaim spaces for life, redemption and professional growth that aim at full emancipation and liberation, both individual and collective, trying to be at the same time a space that welcomes and does not exclude, that nourishes and takes care of the many social biographies that it encounters and follows.

At Econido in Scampia, the themes of care, motherhood, skills development, women's mutual aid, and work-life balance are central to the educational process. This space is a hub for the entire city, and applications far outnumber the available places.

“Women of all ages – say Emma Ferulano and Barbara Pierro of Chi rom e…chi no - Italians, Roma, and migrants are at the heart of our actions, endeavors, and reflections, the cornerstones of our educational, political, social, and professional spaces. We build adventurous yet concrete proposals, together with girls, young people, and women: workspaces that foster passion and strengthen skills, to break the chains of oppression of a survival economy that pushes informal economies to the brink; educational spaces that strengthen parent-child relationships and consolidate the identities not only of mothers but of people with aspirations, skills, talents, and abilities, where women speak up, transforming from beneficiaries into valuable resources for the entire educational community, where motherhood becomes an opportunity for socialization and not a condemnation to isolation; creative, artistic, and cultural spaces where creativity can flow freely and become the catalyst for new worlds in which to overturn the patriarchal and oppressive patterns that daily invalidate and maim women and girls; spaces for struggle and the reconquest of rights; spaces of physical and psychological well-being, for a slow but inexorable journey towards greater "ecological" awareness, self-respect and the reconnection with one's body."

“We are still very far from achieving the goals we have set ourselves – conclude Ferulano and Pierro - because we are clashing with a system that at a global level is not culturally ready to overturn the patterns of domination, but we also know that we are a majority that is no longer so silent and that we cannot do otherwise and insist like drops that erode the stones".