Training · Empowerment · Participatory research · COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY Since 2007
I don't teach people to take photos. I teach groups to change.
I am a community psychologist, and what I train is change. Using photography as a tool, I help a group move from how things are to what they could become, and grow the power to act on it, from the individual, to the group, to the whole community. Organisations, institutions and communities call me when people need not just to understand a situation, but to take hold of it.
With unemployed adults and the Istituto Veneto, I taught people to pitch their own project. For Enel, I guided teams to rethink the lives of vulnerable older people. With the Municipality of Bologna, I helped asylum seekers build their integration with the city. With Venice's UEPE, I supported the return to society of people leaving prison. During Padova Climate Week, we mapped the city's heat islands and its possible climate shelters. For the EU Climate Pact, I led citizens to propose nature based adaptation to a changing climate. In schools, I teach young people to recognise abuse and know how to act. Different rooms, one method, and always the same movement: from seeing, to proposing, to changing.
What the training does
Shaped around your goal, your group, your question.
What it's for
Team building and internal cohesion, citizen and community engagement, participatory research and territorial mapping, social inclusion and reintegration, awareness and behaviour change, education on sensitive issues.
Who it's for
Companies and their teams, public institutions and municipalities, universities and schools, NGOs and associations, and fragile or under-represented groups: workers, students, migrants, older people, survivors.
What I teach
How a group builds a shared vision and acts on it: empowerment from the individual to the community, reading reality together, turning it into proposals, and the participatory photography and Photovoice that make it possible.
SEE THE PROJECTS I LED
Educational, Photography, Laboratory
Trieste - EuCliPa.it | Città verso la Neutralità Climatica
In Piazza Unità the tide reaches the feet of the Bersagliere statue, and a city built on the sea recognises itself in that image. Citizens of Trieste photographed the climate around them in triptychs, one image for what does not work, one for what already does, one for what could be done: rising sea, landslides on the karst slopes, jellyfish in the gulf, plastic on the shore, the abandoned Silos where migrants sleep, and the terraces that still hold the coast together. What comes out is not a complaint but a plan: rain gardens, green roofs, agrivoltaics that leaves the field to the field, and terraces kept porous. Part of Italian Cities Towards Climate Neutrality, run with EuCliPa.it and the EU Climate Pact.
Educational, Photography, Laboratory
Monza - EuCliPa.it | Città verso la Neutralità Climatica
Eight citizens of Monza, all members of local environmental and volunteer associations, photographed the climate in their own city. Working in triptychs, one image for what does not work, one for what already does, one for what could be done, they looked at commuting to Milan, summer heat in the streets of the centre, cycling, the Lambro trapped between concrete banks, bees and squirrels, abandoned lots. What comes out is not a complaint but a plan: nature based solutions, reforestation, permeable ground, a city that can be crossed by bike. Part of Italian Cities Towards Climate Neutrality, run with EuCliPa.it and the EU Climate Pact.
Educational, Photography, Laboratory
Venezia - EuCliPa.it | Città Italiane verso la neutralità Climatica
Venice, photographed by the people who live it. Part of Italian Cities Towards Climate Neutrality, a participatory project run with EuCliPa.it and the EU Climate Pact, this volume gathers the images and words of citizens who documented how the climate is changing their own city, and what could be done about it. Not a study about Venice, but a portrait made from the inside, ending where it matters: in the proposals its inhabitants put forward.
THE METHOD · PHOTOVOICE AND TAILORED VERSIONS
Give a community a camera, and it will show you what to change.
Photovoice hands the camera to the community itself. People photograph the reality they live, read the images together, and turn them into a shared portrait of a place or a problem, and a list of what to change.
I am a documentary photographer and community psychologist, and a pioneer of the method in Italy since 2007. That double training, the eye and the mind, is what lets me use photography not only to document reality, but to take part in it.
HOW IT WORKS
One method, three movements.
From the individual who learns to see, to the group that builds a shared analysis, to the community that carries change to its institutions.
WHAT I DO WITH
One method, declined by purpose.
Photovoice is my core method. I adapt it to the goal: research, training, engagement, mapping, change. These are some of its forms, with real projects.
Scientific research
Qualitative research & mapping
Participatory studies that produce evidence and thematic maps of a territory or an issue.
Case: energy poverty for Enel (Ener-Equity), and childhood-abuse research with the University of Padua.
Training
Training & team building
The method brought into organisations, for vision, cohesion and shared reflection.
Cases: team building for Atlas Copco; training laboratories for artisans and workers with Confartigianato.
Citizen engagement
Community & climate engagement
Residents document and analyse their own place, narrowing the gap with institutions.
Cases: climate work for EuCliPa in Italy and the Netherlands; climate photo walks at Venice Climate Week and Padova Climate Action Week; migrant integration, Municipality of Bologna.
Social Change
Inclusion & reintegration
The method as a tool for dignity, voice and reintegration of fragile groups.
Cases: reintegration of former prisoners, UEPE; laboratories for unemployed people, Istituto Veneto; gender inclusion with EMERGENCY.
POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS
The method is a key, not a lock.
Once a community can photograph what it lives, almost any theme can be mapped, understood and improved from the inside. A few of the directions the method can take.
Environment & territory
Mapping a place
Urban heat maps with existing climate shelters and places that could easily become ones; perceived environmental risks; accessibility of a city for the elderly or people with disabilities; the neglect and care of public space.
Culture & museums
Designing with visitors
Improving museum routes with visitors themselves, in distinct versions for adults and children; reading what works and what loses people in an exhibition; participatory design of new displays.
Organisations & work
Seeing a workplace
Improving the system of relationships in a workplace; team building that surfaces unspoken visions and tensions; mapping organisational wellbeing; building shared identity in new teams.
School & education
Teaching how to see
Laboratories that teach children to recognise and report abuse; visual and critical-thinking education; mapping what makes school a good or hard place; work on bullying, inclusion and transitions.
Health & fragility
Giving a voice
Chronic patients on their own care; reducing stigma around mental health, addiction or illness; reintegration of prisoners, homeless people, migrants; mapping a community's care needs.
Digital & new fields
Beyond the street
Participatory maps of negative, positive and improvable places, online as well as physical; assessing the real experience of a public digital service through citizens' eyes.
The flagship declination
Photo Story, adopted by the European Commission
From this work I created Photo Story, the declination of the method developed for the climate context and adopted by the European Commission for the EU Climate Pact. It is now used across Europe, by others, without me: the sign of a method that works.
TRUSTED BY
A METHOD DELIVERED FOR
European Commission University of Padua
Enel Atlas Copco
Veneto Region CNR
Municipality of Monza Municipality of Bologna
Confartigianato Roma Tre
EMERGENCY ONG