Social Agriculture As a Strategy for (Re)Building Community Bonds. the "Grinlab" Project for Mental Health Vulnerability and Senior Loneliness

Social agriculture represents one of the most innovative sectors capable of integrating productive activities, social services and territorial communities by functionally combining traditional agriculture with therapeutic, educational, and inclusion practices aimed at individuals in vulnerable or socially disadvantaged conditions. Experiences linked to the model of social agriculture can serve as virtuous syntheses between the creation of social bonds and the empowerment and protagonism of individuals, redefined beyond individualistic logic and instead within a community values dimension.

Within this theoretical framework, the "GrInLab" project was developed, focusing particularly on the objective of generating processes of social integration, rehabilitation and inclusion of individuals with psycho-physical fragility, as well as education for sustainability, both environmentally and socially.

The "GrInLab" project experience focused on creating an urban garden within the disused grounds of a school in Puglia. This was made possible through funds from an ANCI grant won by the Municipality of Bisceglie with the project "B.I.S.M.A.R.T.," which was structured into four Social Innovation Workshops, one of which was dedicated to social agriculture, coordinated and developed by Aps A31-20FuturoAnteriore. The main participants in this pilot initiative were individuals with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities and people with mental and psychiatric disorders, aged between 18 and 50 years, identified and selected by Third Sector organizations. The project's impact assessment required innovative forms and strategies based on the specificities of the actors involved, leading to an additional phase of action-research titled "Coltiviamoci" ("Let's Cultivate Ourselves"), which utilized visual sociology methods and was centered on the perceptions of all participants involved.

The successful project demonstrated how initiating multi-actor and innovative pathways, based on the enhancement of social virtues, can circularly fuel social cohesion bonds, encouraging community-oriented choices by individuals.

It was replicated with reference to senior individuals to counter any risks linked with their relational poverty.