Within the background of preventing early school leaving, one of our key goals, we believe it is essential to intervene with initiatives aimed at reducing the territorial gaps that still exist in Italian schools considering certain key indicators.

Some of the possible measures to contrast this phenomenon include initiating systemic actions to contribute to the improvement of the most critical contexts, building stable educational alliances and promoting the elaboration of shared plans.

Bearing this in mind, in 2022 we launched the initial stages of a wide-ranging initiative in Palermo, which aims to permanently strengthen the educational offer of some public schools in the Ballarò, Sperone, Brancaccio, Settecannoli, Cuba-Calatafimi and Albergheria neighborhoods of Palermo.

Through collaboration with schools and local non-profit organizations, the initiative, currently under development, aims at setting up a complex set of actions to:

• prevent the educational failure of students, the phenomenon of occasional attendance, dropout and, more generally, dispersion in its various declinations, in the path of primary and secondary school, promoting an improvement in learning;
• allow for a stable improvement in the educational offer of individual schools over a medium-term horizon, evidenced by specific indicators;
• support the integration between school and extracurricular realities, creating conditions for dialogue and participation between teachers, educational operators and families and promoting co-design and integration between professional skills to promote the learning of basic, socio-emotional and citizenship skills, indispensable in the first cycle of education.

The initiative is an example of how we think philanthropic action, although in limited and defined contexts, can help support the public system and society to reduce the territorial gaps that in some cases still characterize italian schools.