Cooperativa Sociale Liberi Sogni

COOPERATIVA SOCIALE LIBERI SOGNI ONLUS
( www.liberisogni.org )

OUR MISSION
Our organization is involved to create projects and learning experiences and to practice and excel personal and community behaviors that are positive, creative and sustainable and which through the dream component places in the center representations and possible projections of our happiness, wellbeing and harmony.

THE HISTORY
Liberi sogni (Italian for free dreams) is a non-profit organization founded in September 2006 in Northen Italy and it stands above all to promote social/educational and cultural projects, responsible tourism and environmental education in the Valley of Saint Martin where our headquarters are located and where we can know and interact with the inhabitants and their needs. The partners and the freelancers are educators, historians, artist and experts in various disciplines, all in all profoundly tied to the environment and the mountain and for a long time involved in the social area, the volunteers and the associations in the provinces of Lecco, Bergamo, Monza and Milan.
Everyone together intends to valorize and put in evidence what matured during years of experience on this field inside of projects that aspires to create an identification between personal wealth and professional experience.

[Where are we? Val San Martino is a beautiful valley located in the North of Italy, in the provinces of Lecco and Bergamo.
Our headquarter is in a little village in the mountains, called “Sopracornola”.
For more information, please see:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ValSMartinoPosizione.png ]

WHY WE HAVE THIS NAME

The name Liberi Sogni was chosen because we believe in the importance of dreaming, meant as an indispensible stimulus for every individual and as precious guide for one’s choices. The desires of each one of us are pushing to amplify our views beyond the daily routine of our contemporary society, in which the people, especially the youth have difficulty to find its own place, a sense of belonging and the trust in the capacity of being able to carve into the present and the future. Sharing a dream helps us building relationships, interact with others, knowing “The Other” and overcoming whatever form of racism, limitlessness and discrimination. This is also why we propose ourselves to create moments and spaces in which the people could meet and get to know one another, develop motivations and instruments to confront on our development model, to experiment actions and lifestyles in harmony with the ecosystem and with others, to participate at the territory defense and of its natural resources, to correlate the antique with the modern, the city and the mountain, the manual work with the intellectual one, the tradition with the technology, the culture and the local history with the ones from other parts of the world.

INTERVENTION SECTORS
Currently our organizations is involved in three sectors:
SCHOOLS
Environmental education, local history, intercultural, development education, active citizenship, artistic and theatrical workshops, trips and excursions
ENVIRONMENT
Summer residential and self managed camps with children, teenagers and families, ecological days of safeguarding the environment, weekend and trips with a deep nature contact, walking-bus, cycling-bus and old trades workshops, knowledge of the environment and life-style for the sustainable research
EDUCATION AND CULTURE
Summer and winter camps, participating construction realization of cultural and intercultural events, playbuses, artistic and passage workshops for the libraries, teenagers passages on the territory, formation courses and seminars, residential activities with communities for young people and other groups

SOME OF OUR PROJECTS

Here is a list of some of our projects that in some way are reflecting the thematic and the territory context of the San Martin Valley and surroundings.
- Residential summer camps in Consonno
Target: Young people from 10 to 17 years old.
Our project: Consonno was a little village of farmers in the province of Lecco, which during the 60s was bought by a count who transformed it in a “Land of Fun”. The farmer village was destroyed and replaced by a sort of “Las Vegas”.
After an initial gold period, the “Fun land” began declining during the 80s and, little by little, was completely abandoned.
Our organization has organized several summer residential camps for young people from 10 to 17 years old to save and rescue the beautiful woods and breath-taking surroundings of the abandoned village.

- Intercultural workshop: “A school, a thousand tales”
Target: Children from 6 to 10 years old
Our Project: The project was developed in the School of Villasanta, in the neighborhood of Monza. The aim of the workshop was to make children aware of their origins and traditions through the recovery of traditional tales and histories. Moreover, other tales from all over the world were narrated. Through the story-telling the children could focus on and compare different cultures and get in touch with different traditions.

- Intercultural project “Scècc and Chavalas”
In 2010 our organization carried out a project in 5 different schools of the country about story-telling and the research of our traditional tales. At the same time, a women organization in Nicaragua collected their traditional stories. At the end of the project, we published a book in 3 languages (Italian, Spanish and our regional dialect) with all the tales collected.

- Youth council in Olginate (Lecco)
Target: young people from 11 to 14 years old

- Ludospace “Galbiate for the youth, the youth for Garbiate”
Target: teenagers from 13 to 15 years old
Our project: The project takes place in a little town in the province of Lecco, with a particular focus on the difficulties faced by teenagers and the problems related to the abuse of alcohol, drugs and the themes of environmental sustainability, sex education and gender discrimination.
The methods and tools used are various, including artistic workshops, trips in the surrounding woods and mountains, movie-watching, debates, etc.