Santorso

Type: Municipality
Population: 5769
Extension: 13,21 km2
Density: 436,71 inhabitants per sq. Km

Key Aspects

Santorso has a twin pilot in Italy: Valsamoggia. The two communities will work independently but staying in touch and sharing experiences, programs and possibly resources.
Both pilots decided during the International Training to adopt Sociocracy 3.0 as a governance model for their Core Teams. The aim is to give the group the best chances to handle diversity and share power.

Context

Santorso is situated in the north east of Italy, in one of the richest and most productive industrial areas of the national territory. Its population amounts at just 6000 inhabitants, and the most of the citizens go to work or to school in neighboring towns.
On the other hand, citizens are very active socially, as dozens of associations with many different aims and interests work for the well being of the town. All of the organizations are also in good relationships with the municipality.
Transition Town Santorso is one of them and in the last 7 years it has created many opportunities for people to connect, share knowledge, understand the global context and develop local solutions.
At present we feel we have enough experience and cultural density in the area (about resilience and transition processes) that starting projects with a higher level of complexity is much easier than before.

Challenges

• Changing the mindset of the short term thinking and less willingness to cooperate with other people and organisations, generally due to lack of money.
• Need of trained people on facilitation, sustainable issues and social innovation. As a consequence of the lack of money, there are no groups or individuals in the municipality who are given this role.
• Reduction of bureaucracy, which normally hampers any action of the Municipality (e.g. ability to connect, to involve civil society, to experiment new projects and processes).
• Need of somebody taking care of the organisational structure and finding ways to improve it.
• Need of support from politicc regardless their orientation. Parties also tend to concentrate all their energies and ideas during the elections period, becoming much less active once it’s over. Civil society suffers from this cycles because it lacks clarity about politicians’s motivations and intentions, and the perceived distance between these two categories grows even more.
• Need of mutual understanding between Municipality (its functions, prerogatives and capacities) and civil society.