¿Cómo promover intervenciones para y con las familias?: la experiencia de Friuli-Venecia Julia

In recent years increasing attention has been devoted to the role that linked-in-association families can play in enabling and empowering civil society. International literature on family services agrees that a family’s capability to meet its own needs is strengthened by networking and sharing resources and skills with other families. For this reason, it is now essential that family associations take part in planning and implementing family services: in this way, families can actually become leading actors, according to the principle of subsidiarity. In Italy, some laws in a family friendly perspective have been issued at a regional level. It is the case of the law 11/2006 in the Italian Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia: in particular, it provides measures to promote – through regional financing – the self-organization and the networking of families, in order to meet their own problems. This paper aims to present the results of the survey of the 123 projects admitted to the financing. Two models, developed within a relational sociological approach, were used for the analysis of the projects. The first model measured “familiarity”, seen as the ability to activate families in designing and realizing the interventions. The second model measured the “relational quality”, seen as the ability to promote a participative approach in planning, realizing, and evaluating the interventions. The data were collected through an online questionnaire. The results confirm not only that family associations create and support trusty bonds within the families and among associated families, but also the ability of these associations to promote social capital in the communities in which they act.