Absence of government capacity is a major cause of poverty and misery around the world… Without an effective state working with active and engaged citizens, there is little chance of achieving the growth needed to abolish global poverty.
Fondazione Etica designs and implements innovative activities with a social impact. The idea may seem abstract or even vague, but in countries like Great Britain and the USA it is a long lasting cultural model, before being a political and economic one.
What isINNOVATION WITH SOCIAL IMPACT?
The answer is simple: the need to rethink an overall development modelor of a community, acknowledging the failure of the previous models. A failure demonstrated by the ongoing global economic and financial crisis:
“We are used to thinking of innovation, the real one, as something that takes place in universities and inside the laboratories of large companies. It is there that real scientists are at work, with their advanced knowledge and exclusive skills, to churn out new products - machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners - which bring new benefits for everyone. The state takes care of social issues, with its social services, health system, economic and development policies. It is the political organizations that put pressure on the state: parties, trade unions and social movements, which underline the things that are wrong, or that are going wrong and which, consequently, require intervention. And the three spheres remain clearly separated.”
This system does not work anymore.
This is demonstrated by the general impoverishment, the social inequalities, the consequent social tensions, the inability of the State to face new social needs, the high level of public inefficiency and corruption.
The G8 countries, and Italy in particular, will have to cope, in the coming years, with a strong need for uncovered spending on welfare services: hence the importance that social innovation becomes the scope of connection between the need for incompressible services, the inadequacy of resources available to the public decision-maker, the investors' search for profit. No longer distinct, and sometimes opposed, subjects, but partners of a functioning and modern society, even before being ideal and fair.
