Poverty and generative welfare: perspectives for a new approach to social intervention

The welfare systems have used different ways to deal with the transition from compassionate help to state-regulated aid or, in other terms, moving from charity-based to justice-based approaches. In the last century, many human needs have become rights, with cash aid and services provided by local authorities. In Europe these rights and the associated responses are mainly based on universal and mutual protection, using complementary ways to promote social justice. The main challenge is to ensure sustainability and distributive equity while bearing in mind the ethical dilemmas to be addressed by this difficult balance. The main critical issues are concentrated in the solutions used to guarantee the protection of rights, with fiscal, mutualistic and insurance approaches, integrating public and private social protection schemes. The difficulties and gaps to be overcome are recognisable in the ability to manage services with adequate administrative and professional means. The growing problems of sustainability highlights the difficulties in harmonising the rights with duties. In order to address these problems in new ways, it is necessary that welfare responses become more capable of enhancing the abilities and potential of each individual. When a person and/or a family ask for help, they are not asking to be institutionalised into care, but to be able to get out of care thanks to the help they receive. Generative welfare practices, question the power relationship between those who help and those who are helped, favouring the mutual respect, the integration of responsibilities, the valorisation of skills and experiences that together contribute towards shared results. For this reason it is necessary to create/build the conditions to achieve a joint contribution to the result by those who help and those who are helped. This happens more easily when professional and non-professional competences (of people) act together, investing in the passage from "I" to "We", making responsibilities and resources converge on shared outcomes. The helping relationship also requires opportunities for the professional, together with the person they assist, to support and emotionally regenerate by extending sharing to others. Research shows that generative help cannot be exhausted in a two-way relationship. The helping relationship initiates and produces ever more extensive relational co-implications, involving colleagues, professionals, citizens who participate in formal and informal welfare networks within which service users and members of a local community co-determine self-realisation.