Arci, Walter Massa is the new national president: “A close fight against everything that produces fear and intolerance”

“Care and Proximity”. Thus indicates the future course, Walter Massa, now the new national president of ARCI. Already at the top of the association in Genoa and Liguria, the Genoese was nominated this afternoon by a large majority of the national association council at the end of the congress taking place in Rome. A return to face-to-face assembly, after the years of Covid, which it was not by chance that it was presented with the title “To get out of a nightmare, it’s not enough to wake up. We need to dream faster”. A message to the country, in some ways also to national politics, first and foremost that of the progressive scene.

On the table the themes that will engage the association in the coming years, “peace, environment, work, mutualism, common goods, defense of the right to abortion, of basic income, but also contrast to the government’s proposal for differentiated autonomy, support for NGO at sea, total opposition to the bridge over the Strait, request for specific tax measures for work in the Third sector, support and interventions for the high bills that have hit the circles, strengthening of internal areas and cultural actions in marginal territories” – it is the synthesis of four days of work – after all, all the many souls of a progressive area who find no space for dialogue elsewhere gathered at the 18th ARCI congress. The Democratic Party and the M5s, the Italian Left and the Greens, and then associations and ACLI, NGOs and CGIL, Fridays for Future and Legacoop.

Genoese, just turned 50, Massa boasts a long career in Arci, which began in the 90s as a partner and then as a club animator, an experience that led him to be the first manager of the Genoese Arci from 2000 to 2008 and subsequently President of Arci Liguria from 2008 to 2018 and, following the serious pandemic situation, again in the two-year period 2021-2022. At the national level, Massa has held various national positions since the mid-2000s: he was in charge of childhood and adolescence and, thanks to more than twenty years of experience in the field of immigration and asylum, inclusion and reception, he held the role of national immigration and asylum manager, that of coordinator of the reception network for asylum seekers and refugees as well as having been a member of the Arci national presidency for over a decade. Since 2021 he has also been the Director General of the Consortium Officine Solidali, promoted by the national Arci and by 23 other entities belonging to the Arci present throughout the national territory.

“Care and proximity – said Massa during his first greeting – have been the priority of these months before and after the pandemic and they must be the engine that will also guide us in the near future. We have a difficult task to carry out which is linked to a close fight against people’s loneliness which produces fear, intolerance and selfishness. We bring into play the strength of our creativity and the certainty of our territorial roots. The Arci that has never stopped, not even during the lockdown period, starts again from here. With the serenity found in recent months and with the courage that she has never lacked. Come on!”.