Lamezia, ‘The gift and the city’ in the new book by Don Giacomo Panizza on the future of volunteering

Lamezia Terme – “If health becomes a company, school a business, the management of the environment and water a market issue, volunteering – which in Italy involves around 4 and a half million people – is put into ‘corner. And his internal souls differentiate and distance themselves from each other, coming into conflict. Giacomo Panizza, a priest from Brescia in Calabria for over thirty years, lives under protection because he has been in the crosshairs of the gangs since 2002 for having witnessed justice against a mafia clan and having taken over a confiscated building. This does not prevent him from continuing his activities on behalf of people in difficulty and from being a prophetic voice inside and outside the Church.” This is how his new book ‘The gift and the city’ is presented by Don Giacomo Panizza, “in bookstores on April 26th from Bibliotheka editions (152 pages, 18 euros, ebook at 4.99), as a lucid and reasoned provocation on the future of volunteering”.

“In certain respects, observes Panizza, the voluntary sector that manages services today resembles, in its methods, the services of the private for-profit sector. For this reason it is necessary for it to return to giving itself a cultural and political direction, deciding to carry out a ‘public’ service capable of overcoming the trap of the mere market of social services. Volunteer associations, recalls the Brescia-Calabrian priest, are not destined to put improvised plasters on public administrations that are heedless of welfare and the rights of those who need it most. The intermediate bodies of society do not come together to stem the distractions or misdeeds of politics and the market. And they constitute privileged places not when they distribute consolatory gifts, but if they accompany people to set in motion solidarity, sharing and acceptance, and when they generate and regenerate trust in the inhabitants of a territory”.

The internal souls of the so-called third sector – management, welfare, movement, entrepreneurial – risk differentiating themselves and conflicting with each other. For this reason, Panizza points out, we need diversified volunteers who are strengthened by going beyond the social sphere, giving greater consistency to other sectors such as civil protection, the environment and energy, cultural heritage, lifestyles. respectful of the decrease in consumption, participatory citizenship, education in constructive civic practices of local communities. Because not only social volunteering, but the entire archipelago of volunteers is a potential messenger of legality and cohesion. “We will only be capable of a future if we know how to adopt an adult style of volunteering, which does not only operate in response to what we see with the naked eye, but investigates with a critical eye into the depths of the immediate and remote causes of difficulties and discomfort. A political role, therefore.” “Awarded by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella with the honor of Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, it is said in conclusion, Panizza founded the ‘Progetto Sud’ community in Lamezia Terme and is the author of books on the ‘ndrangheta, legality and the educational challenges posed by the mafias”.