Changes at "Rural Dynamicisation that includes a Care Home, Soil Restoration, and Refugee Integration"
Body (English)
-Rural Dynamicisation that includes a Care Home, Soil Restoration, and Refugee Integration- +Summary of the challenge
- +Rural areas in Puglia are only being invested in and developed for tourism rather than businesses that cater to diversification of the economy of Salento. Tourism only provides seasonal jobs to locals and perpetuates the precarious dependence on the hospitality industry that often does not include regeneration of land in conjunction with projects.
- +Detailed description
- +Jabali addresses three urgent, intertwined challenges in Italy's Apulia region and beyond: the growing need for dignified care for elders with dementia, the restoration of barren land that has been disturbed by centuries of monocultures, and the imperative for refugee integration. Our founder, Naomi, was inspired by her father's experience with Alzheimer's to reimagine care home facilities. We aim to revitalize an abandoned structure and make it suitable for dementia patients and restore organic matter over time to a "dead" piece of land. Our goal is to transform its 3-hectare grounds into a highly productive regenerative/syntropic farm. This practice directly confronts soil degradation and land abandonment, ensuring soil health and biodiversity. Our model is one of Regenerative Transitions and Territorial Justice: we are not just building a care home to make profit, but a regenerative ecosystem where elderly residents and new refugees to Italy can thrive amidst nature and be trained as professional caretakers, find purpose and belonging. The farm will provide fresh organic food for the home and a landing place for refugees to rebuild their lives, connecting them to the land and the community, and challenging social exclusion with a powerful narrative of mutual support. Please see Jabali.it for further description.
- +Which SoilTribes priority area(s) does your challenge address?
- +Territorial Justice
- +Regenerative Transitions
- +How does your challenge respond to the selected SoilTribes priority area(s)?
- +The goal is to utilise and reinvigorate rural areas in agricultural areas responsibly and wisely. Constructing a care home (responding to a need for global elderly citizens), addressing the refugee crisis and providing them with integration opportunity and job training, and helping to transition underutilised land that has been disturbed from monocultures into thriving regenerative farms that practice agroforestry all make for a holistic and -regenerative- transition.
- +Which EU Soil Mission goal(s) does your challenge contribute to?
- +Reduce soil pollution / enhance restoration
- +Conserve soil organic carbon
- +Reduce desertification
- +Enhance soil biodiversity
- +Challenge typology
- +Roots (deep structural transformation)
- +Expected outputs / actions
- +Creative or cultural events
- +Capacity-building (training, guides, mentorship)
- +Prototyping or technical testing
- +Who is involved or affected by the challenge?
- +Refugees (extra-communitari), local healthcare professionals, the elderly with dementia/Alzheimer's, local government and municipal departments, local farmers and the broader Salentino community.
- +Where is your challenge located?
- +Salento, Puglia, Italy
- +Which SoilTribes pillar(s) are you connected to?
- +Business: Social Economy & Cooperative Sector
- +What public policies or institutional frameworks does your challenge engage with or seek to change?
- +n/a
- +How do you imagine the Bootcamp will benefit your initiative — and others?
- +I have an agroecology degree from UBC, a wealth of knowledge about the tech sector (I was a software engineer for 6 years) including the decentralized governance and finance sector of tech, and a persistent fire in my being to regenerate some land and have it 1) not be a touristic project and 2) not be a project only very alternative people would gravitate to. I always aim to bridge so it can be palatable to many different groups of people. After 10 years of marinating this idea in my head, I'm ready to get very serious about refining it with expert mentorship and perspective so I can bring it to fruition sooner rather than later in the world of ever increasing polycrises.
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