Accompanying to Escape Poverty: The Power of Social Inclusion

In recent years, the debate on the issues of hardship and social inclusion has focused above all on policies to combat poverty through economic subsidies and income support. In this paper, we instead analyse experiences of social inclusion through a survey on the work reintegration projects promoted by the Italian Caritas, to understand the success factors and the constraints of projects not based on direct economic subsidy. Even though the evaluation of the outcomes is difficult, the results highlight the ability of these experiences to ‘regenerate’ people in economic and social difficulty. The most important aspects of accompaniment for achieving this independence are the number of volunteers involved, the density of the network of organizations that contribute to the project, the number of professional operators and the overall expenditure of the project.