The Punto Meet hub closes its first three years of activity and celebrates, on Wednesday 19 June, with a day to tell the city about itself and explore the issues related to migration in the province of Cuneo. MEET IN, this is the title of the initiative, aims to be a moment of “restitution” of the activity carried out so far, with a look at the present, on a complex issue such as that of migration, and one to the future, to then conclude with a music party at the Parco della Resistenza. The initiative, organized by the Municipality of Cuneo and Punto Meet in collaboration with Sai Cuneo, is part of the “With different eyes” event: meetings, shows and activities on the occasion of World Refugee Day 2024, the complete calendar of which can be viewed on Sai Cuneo website (link).
MEET IN opens on Wednesday afternoon with an open house at the hub, in Cuneo in via Leutrum 7, with the possibility of visiting it accompanied by the operators who work there. The guided tours will be held from 2pm to 4pm, with free and open access, without the need for reservations. Starting from 4pm, again in the Punto Meet premises, conference with the presentation of the three-year activity of the hub and, to follow, a round table entitled “Looks at migration in the province”, with the participation of the mayor of Cuneo, Patrizia Manassero , the vice-prefect Maria Antonietta Bambagiotti, the police commissioner Carmine Rocco Grassi and the director of the Cuneo Social Welfare Consortium, Giulia Manassero. The table will be moderated by Irene Ponzo, deputy director of FIERI (International and European Forum for Migration Research).
To close the day, starting from 8.15pm, Moussa Sanou in concert at the Parco della Resistenza. Moussa is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, author, arranger and composer: he plays around 15 different instruments, including the kora, the balafon (“African cousin” of the piano), the djembé, the tambour d’aisselle (“talking” drum), the N’Goni, the barà (percussion accompanying the balafon), the doum-doum (bass drums), the maracas, the bells (cloches). Launched on 1 April 2021, the project that led to the birth of the Punto Meet hub is the result of co-planning: the service is in fact managed by the Municipality of Cuneo, which is also the owner of the premises in which it is based, together with a network of partners, made up of the Fiordaliso cooperatives, which is the leader, MOMO, ORSO., Emmanuele and the Spazio Mediazione e Intercultura association.
The hub was created as a meeting point between users and services, as well as to make collaboration between different entities effective and effective. In continuous dialogue with the territory, its main objective is the inclusion of the migrant population and the elimination of barriers to access to services and rights. In this first three years of activity, the center recorded 11,510 accesses to its desk, with a total of 13,615 people reached. A figure with a significant growth trend, with accesses going from 1,853 in 2021 to just under 7,000 in 2023 (also counting the first three months of 2024). The access data also reveal that the Meet Point, despite being a service owned by the Municipality of Cuneo, responds to the needs of people coming from a territorial area that is decidedly wider than the municipal one. In April and May 2024, for example, half of the total users were made up of people coming from outside the municipality, from 54 municipalities in the province of Cuneo, while 3% came from outside the province.
The Meet Point is also the fulcrum of a series of important reception projects for the territory, such as the SAI (Reception and Integration System) of the Municipality of Cuneo, for which it carries out the function of collecting, evaluating and sending the self-reports of people who request access the reception service, or the countless projects to support seasonal migrants. The Meet Point was crucial during the first phase of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict when, with an extraordinary reception centre, 67 Ukrainian refugees were hosted and the InfoUkraine desk was activated.
The activity of the center then extends to the school side, with foreign students of 14 nationalities and 15 Cuneo institutes followed in school placement paths, intercultural citizenship initiatives, with the organization of workshops for adults and children, intercultural events and festivals, and 700 hours of intercultural mediation. An important service of the Hub is the Infopoint, financed by the Common Ground project, which deals with the fight against and prevention of labor exploitation, with registration and profiling activities, legal support and job search orientation. The Meet Point then hosts the provincial node against discrimination and the Anello Forte project, with anti-trafficking operators who carry out work to highlight the phenomenon of sexual trafficking.
