The independence of the person with disabilities is the seed that must be everyone’s responsibility to sprout, grow and develop.

July 21, 2014 – New York, United Nations
Today, 8 years ago, the project “Swimming in the seas of the globe, for a world without barriers and without borders” was presented to the United Nations. Designed to overcome all disabilities. An objective that is achievable, I believe, only through the liberalization of technologies that can pass through the drawers of the main research centers to become the object of programs that make them accessible to people with disabilities.true
photo: Salvatore Cimmino between Michail Lenton and Eugenio Guglielmelli

The Italian Social Service has always incorporated a semantic contradiction: social policies, the professionals who give life to social work, should deny the idea and practices of assistance with their conduct. People with disabilities, who enter into relationships and interact with institutions should receive support and stimuli oriented towards autonomy and self-determination, and not dependence: a typical condition of assistance, which degenerates into welfarism.

Disabilities within a family is a presence that touches all its components, all dynamics and functioning: poverty, marginalization, denied rights. Frames already seen and very well known of impoverished Italy which paradoxically spends money on the most needy: everyone continues to ask for funds, as if palliative care was required to treat a tumor.

Let’s try to imagine a different, generative welfare, where the skills of people with disabilities become the engine of economic development. The goal would be that of a supportive and cohesive society that invents and develops a consideration for not only individual rights but also social ones. In exchange for integration, the recipient would be asked to do something for the common good, safeguarding its dignity and giving it economic value.

A law on the equalization of accidents in life with accidents at work would be ideal, an undoubtedly onerous investment but which would promote the recovery to active life for an important number of people and, I am sure, would be transformed with the generative logic into services to families with disabilities by generating wealth and employment.

Courage and new approaches are needed. An idea for a future government program.

Salvatore Cimmino