The first sixty years of COOPI: the NGO that in 73 countries around the world is committed to breaking the poverty trap

MILAN – Today is a special date for COOPI, who turns 60. The Italian humanitarian organization was founded in Milan on April 15, 1965. Fifty-eight years ago, Father Vincenzo Barbieri laid the foundations, “Following the wind”, as he liked to say, with the sole aim of improving the world together. Since then, the commitment of the women and men of this NGO has extended to 73 countries with 2,519 projects in different fields: from the fight against poverty and malnutrition, to support for education and training. In 58 years – reads their curriculum – 110 million people have been helped, both in emergency contexts, responding to wars and natural disasters, and in development areas, promoting economic growth while respecting the environment.

Emergency and development interventions. COOPI operates in contexts of extreme poverty and socio-political or environmental fragility with an approach that links emergency interventions with support for community development, precisely to ensure a long-term sustainable response, continuity between security, humanitarian assistance and development. Faced with a humanitarian emergency, the NGO has shown over time a growing ability to find innovative solutions to meet the immediate needs of the population. In particular, in the Middle East, torn apart by the Syrian crisis, and in the Lake Chad Region, hit by the violence of the Boko Haram jihadists, COOPI proposes a model of intervention that is no longer just local but multi-country, which allows us to respond more coordinated with displaced and refugee communities.

From 60 “on the right track” with the help of laymen. From that April 15th 1965, therefore, a decades-long journey began during which COOPI and the Italian International Cooperation, with all the many voices, will grow and transform together. However, the history of COOPI begins before 1965, already in 1961, when the young Jesuit Vincenzo Barbieri was sent by his superiors to study in Lyon, at the Faculty of Theology, in view of a future departure for Chad as a missionary. In France he encounters a much more lively and open cultural environment than the one that permeated the Italian province in the years preceding the Second Vatican Council and comes into contact with international lay movements that have been involved in volunteering in developing countries for years. In 1962 Barbieri gave up going as a missionary and returned to Milan with the intention of forming volunteers ready to leave for the southern hemisphere. It is he who introduces the lay component into the missions.

The “megaphone of charity”. It is the appellation assigned to Vincenzo Barbieri for his style capable of moving the consciences of an Italy in full transformation in 1965. A Jesuit, a tireless worker, Barbieri was a missionary until the last day of his life: he was not satisfied with preside over his NGO, but he spent himself personally in awareness-raising and fundraising activities for the needy. From the streets of Milan to the most remote African districts, for Barbieri the priority remained helping others, without distinction, without judgement. A new way of seeing International Cooperation, finally open to lay personnel as long as they are motivated, in which “cooperating” takes the form of “doing things together”, side by side.

The concept of poverty. However, the theme of poverty, remembering this birthday of COOPI, needs to be explained better. Because it seems simple to assume this concept from common definitions, but in reality it is a complicated concept and conditioned by very different factors. It is good to start from a datum, moreover disseminated several times by Solidarity world: and that is that today we live in a world where the wealth possessed by the richest 1% of the global population is equal to that of the rest of the world. In short, the clear and incontrovertible fact is that there is poverty in almost all the countries of the world, including those located in the richest part of the Pineta. But poverty becomes “extreme” in almost all so-called “developing” countries. There World Bankin this regard, has set a parameter to define the concept of extreme poverty: it is the experience of those who have less than one US dollar a day.

How the poverty trap is created. This is the kind of situation that ultimately forces poor families to continue to be poor for three or more generations due to a variety of factors. Because of the short life expectancy among the poorest, for one thing. For example, for a newborn, poverty begins at birth and, if he survives, he grows up malnourished, often ill precisely because his mother does not have the resources or the opportunities to guarantee him a better life. Thus a cycle is triggered that continues until that newborn becomes a poor adult, who will give birth to other poor children. The specific indicators of the cycle of poverty are scarce food, little water available, ill health, ignorance, illiteracy, lack of hygiene.

The Culture of Poverty. There is a school of thought according to which the poor develop specific behavioral norms that are rooted in their lives and which are very different from those adopted by people who are not poor. It is an explanation – not shared by all – of what the cycle of poverty really is. In essence, it highlights the fact that when one grows up in a poor context, people assume a lifestyle, a sort of “attitude” to poverty that makes that condition chronic. We try to affirm, in other words, that he was born and raised in poor areas of the world internalizes a distrust of a dark, hopeless future, to the point that he doesn’t even try to get out of his condition of poverty, not even through programs of development developed by the international humanitarian system. This is a way of seeing the phenomenon – not by chance that it is rarely shared, although very widespread – which evidently does not take into account the political and economic background that generates it.