RIES – Italian Network for the Solidarity Economy, was founded in January 2020 as a second-level association (i.e., members are themselves networks or organizations) to promote Solidarity Economy initiatives, territories and circuits in Italy. The Network builds on the 20-year national experience of the RES coordination (Tavolo della Rete di Economia Solidale), in order to strengthen the capacity to give representation to the Solidarity and Transformative Economy on the Italian territory, to open up to interaction with other realities moving in the same direction and to offer an alternative to the dominant model and the growing economic, environmental, social and cultural crises.
RIES is thus a formal association capable of operating as a “civil institution”/ structured organization in dialogue with other public and private and social institutions. It has 30 members: regional, sectoral and inter-sectoral networks and organisations.
Objective of RIES: “Net-working”
RIES aims to amplify and systemize initiatives that can multiply the Solidarity Economy and make it pervasive and widespread nationally and internationally, enhancing its role as a collector that networks and circulates experiences, projects and visions. RIES’s role is to build a collective identity that is visible and immediately recognizable, that takes a public voice, with a strong position: to enable synergies, to broaden the front of the forces of change in order to be effective and incisive.
Starting from a careful, critical and conscious reading of social needs, it proposes to re-elaborate a theoretical-practical framework that communicates and enhances the reference principles and shared goals, adopting a territorial perspective and having solidarity communities as reference.
Constructing the Italian Solidarity Economy Network thus amounts first and foremost to net-working:
– in and between territories
– at the national level and between sectors
– at the political, institutional, public level (to translate theory into policies)
– connecting with other alter-economic realities (as part of an international plural movement of transformative economies).
