When social needs merge with research, innovation and environmental sustainability

In 1991, the psychiatric service of the Local Health Authority (LHA) founded a cooperative with the aim of offering job opportunities in a protected work environment. Local municipalities entrusted the cooperative with the rehabilitation of social & work abilities of vulnerable people in accordance with the law. The problems faced by the LHA & by Municipalities derive from 2 main needs: 1) create & maintain work for disadvantaged people beyond the resource capacity of their social services; 2) organize the treatment of organic & non-organic waste in a simpler and cheaper way. Therefore, the creation of a social cooperative (SE) has mainly responded to the need for job inclusion;secondly, to the need of workers for ecological assistance and waste management and disposal. Local institutions have created an entity that has had the ability to develop more and more to ensure its livelihoods until it becomes a true enterprise at the service of the community. The born SE has therefore generated a virtuous process of innovation that in turn has responded to 2 needs. The first was that of remaining economically beyond the insufficient public resources, the second of earning income to maintain its activity at the service of the community. The role played by the public sector has been fundamental for the start of the cooperative and for promoting the entire innovation process, but the entrepreneurial ability combined with the sense of community of the managers has given success