About
I have worked on poverty and social work for twenty years: first in education and international cooperation, then inside services, then in research, and for years now also in managing the organisations that keep those services running. The same problems seen from different positions.
Background
I studied Development Economics and International Cooperation at the University of Parma and Anthropology of the Contemporary World at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. In 2011-2012 I lived in Madagascar as project manager for the NGO RTM – Volontari nel mondo, on a programme of community networks for psychiatric prevention and rehabilitation in the Amoron'i Mania region. That is where my attention to how a community recognises and treats suffering comes from.
My relationship with Caritas in Reggio Emilia began in 2005 as a volunteer and became work in 2007, first as a trainer in schools and parishes, then as head of global education. After the Madagascar period I returned to Caritas as a community organiser from 2012, social project designer and training coordinator from 2014, head of the regional Social Policy Observatory from 2018, deputy director from 2018, interim director from 2022 and director from 2023.
Between 2021 and 2025 I completed my PhD at Università Cattolica in Milan, with research on anti-poverty practices conducted from inside the services themselves.
Today I lead Caritas of the diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla. It is from this experience, and from twenty years of work inside services, that my work accompanying other organisations grows.
Theoretical frame
I work within two frames. Relational Social Work, which treats the people involved as co-authors of the intervention rather than recipients of a service. And the Poverty-Aware Paradigm, which holds together the material dimension of poverty and the symbolic one of shame and recognition.
The methods I am familiar with are action research, practice research and participatory research: I collect data in order to change practice, not only to describe it. The studies I run start inside services and return to them in a usable form.
How I work
I work from what an organisation already does, through an anthropological approach of participant observation. What I look for is the distance between rhetoric and practice, between what is said and what is done: what Michel Foucault called the “analysis of a regime of practices”, understood as “the place where what is said and what is done, the rules one imposes on oneself and the reasons one gives oneself, projects and evidence, are linked together”.
Practices exist before I arrive: my task is to make them visible, bring them into focus with the tools of social research, and hand them back to the people who enact them in a form they can reason and decide on. Research, training, supervision and consulting are four ways of doing the same operation, at different depths and timescales.
Milestones
Professional training
