Sardinia calling Sardinia
The call from the Sardinian youth willing to change
Why we are calling you
We are Sardinian men and women: self-employees and entrepreneurs, employees, job seekers, and students.
We are under40 young people, we live uncertain lives and so far, we don’t feel properly represented by politicians governing our Island for way too long. A too-often-clientelist political class full of upstarts, that ignores people’s needs and expectations, removes any opportunity for dialogue and engagement and wastes Sardinian assets to pursue irrelevant interests. A political class mainly corrupted by opposite interests compared to those perceived by the majority of people living in our land, namely the interests of multinational companies, big exploitive companies, private foundations and freemasonry, which decide for the future of Sardinia without being actually elected by anybody.
The Sardinia we are inheriting from them is broken, more and more depopulated and depressed. A land that seems to be condemned to a present and a future of precarious and over-exploited jobs, unemployment, difficulties in undertaking good entrepreneurial paths, poverty, high energy costs, pollution, service inefficiency and, as a consequence, very often, forced out-migration.
Nevertheless, every day, we commit ourselves, with passion and by activating our competencies, to live with dignity and to make our Island a better place. As, unlike those who run it, we are able to recognise its huge potential.
There are, among us, people that almost totally dedicate themselves to studying, to passionately working or inventing a new job. There is someone engaged in the local public institutions or in some NGOs, in the cultural and in volunteering sectors. Moreover, there are people who animated – and still keep doing it – movements for the defense of healthcare rights, that fight for a just milk price to be paid to producers, that stand for the protection of job positions and rights, that enliven the protests against the cut-offs in services, the battles for more accessible schools and universities…and many other important and necessary fights that usually appear in the newspapers.
Are you in?
Then, you would agree with us on the fact that this commitment is still not enough.
It is not enough anymore if we want to stop the collapse of our land in economic, social, environmental and demographic terms.
It is not enough anymore if we want Sardinia to be, eventually, a mosaic of places in which people can live with dignity, from cities to smaller villages.
It is not enough anymore if we want to fight against the collapse of an idea of Sardinia willing to invest: in the youngsters and in their education; in a new socially fair and ecologically sustainable development model, able to generate richness for those who live in this land; in giving value to its multiple languages, to its history; in its role as a protagonist at the political and economic level, in the Euro-Mediterranean area.
It is not enough anymore if we want Sardinia to be committed, democratised, self-determined and able to generate opportunities.
To try to achieve it we need to do what those who are ruling for too long would not like us to do: get together through networking, to build a huge movement of political and cultural change, towards and beyond the next regional and local election dates. A movement animated by those who keep holding up this place to regain the possibility to decide about it.
This is why we are calling you: to meet us, also in order for you to tell us about the Sardinia you wish. We can avoid the collapse and we can build the change together, for our own sake and for the sake of those who will live in Sardinia in the future.
The Sardinia we are inheriting
From Italian governments, for decades, we have only got the crumbs, in terms of roads’ infrastructures, mobility, services and – when implemented – employment-related projects which turned out to be pollutant and unsustainable and keep on defining the present of our Island.
In the buildings of the Sardinian Regional Government didn’t go better, being occupied for too long by upstart and arrogant people, driven by the only goal to take care, without obstacles, of their clients. Besides some positive political seasons, the governments following one another in “Via Roma” (where the Regional government headquarter is located, in Cagliari) are characterised by the wrong choices, missing or distant from the real interests of the majority of citizens. Interests of power groups deciding of the destiny of Sardinia, even though they have never been elected by anyone. These are predictable consequences, if you nurture a highly unqualified “leading” class, old for its ideas, even more than for its demographic age, which is primarily committed to feeding an underdevelopment condition in the Island, rather than leading the social and economic development.
Just to be clear: there are a lot of valuable people committed in the current political context, but in the end, those who are making decisions are always the usual suspects.
On every election day, the latter included, we assist to power games and to a lot of promises related to projects and development for our Island, which are regularly unfulfilled.
Thus, our beloved land seems to be condemned to a present and a future of precarious and over-exploited jobs, unemployment, poverty, illegal work, depopulation and, as a consequence, very often, forced out-migration. Condemned to a dependent economy, not very dynamic and productive, characterised by infrastructural disadvantages, lack of investments in process and product innovations, with entire sectors of the productive structure that appear under-sized and fragmented.
The Sardinia we wish
It is not the time to delegate anymore, to those who created this situation, the future of our land. For this reason, we would like to imagine with you and with all the people that care about it, what kind of Sardinia we should build in the next decades. We only want to provide you with a values framework, to be enriched with your contribution. Upon these values, we ask you to say what you think and to be active with us!
1. We wish a Sardinia able to fight against social inequalities by defining a new, more just and sustainable development model, finally starting from our productive and cultural peculiarities, to be reinvented or innovated, to create a robust economic fabric, diversified and dynamic, able to compete in the world, thanks to the quality of products and services, to the cooperation among actors involved, to the investments in technological and digital innovation, to the economic wellness and to the training for workers, to the ecologically sustainable productions and services that also create positive social impact.
2. We would like Sardinia to be able to invest in knowledge and know-how, on the right to life-long study and free access to culture, extremely increasing the number of high school and university graduates, the pivotal knowledge and competences useful to renew the jobs’ market, to build a complete democracy and to foster social wellbeing.
3. We would like Sardinia to be a place where being women is not a disadvantage, both in work and daily life, with innovative work policies, new childcare services, elderly and disabled people care services, territorial social-health services, and with widespread clinics and violence protection centres, sex and relational education in schools to eradicate gender and homo-lesbian-trans-phobic violence from the roots.
4. We would like Sardinia to be multi-language, to proudly speak its own language in every field of the public sphere and to know its people’s history, ceasing to self-perceive itself as peripheral but, on the contrary, becoming aware of being one centre and part and parcel of the European and Mediterranean history.
5. We would like Sardinia as a mosaic of places in which it is possible to live with dignity, thanks to a quality employment, services and social and civil rights guaranteed, from the cities to the smallest of the villages. To overcome the existence of territories that are considered way more important than others.
6. We would like Sardinia to be 100% renewable and energy independent, being at the service of Sardinian communities and firms rather than of “wind” and “sun” multinational companies.
7. We would like Sardinia to take care of the territory and to give it value again through multifunctional agriculture and policies aiming to close the supply chains and support the production, to provide training and innovative learning opportunities fostering a generational turnover that would make our countryside’s heart beating.
8. We would like Sardinia to be able to answer to the new needs of its inhabitants, with new infrastructures and an efficient and transparent Public Administration which actively supports the economic modernisation and the consolidation of the social and cultural fabric.
9. We would like Sardinia to be free from old and new centralisms, to stride towards its own political and institutional self-determination in the Euro-Mediterranean area and, to immediately take advantage of its Autonomy, in order to assert its interests before the State and to re-balance the power at the regional level, in favour of the local authorities.
What movement we would like
1. Open, plural, inclusive: able to build relationships, to spread knowledge, to generate trust in collective action. In such a society in which free time is progressively disappearing, we want to restore the beauty of political participation for everybody.
2. Participated dynamic, constructive: a civic platform, in presence and online, where to discuss, decide, link ideas, make plans and proposals, for learning and for activities, where, at the same time, the many people living abroad but willing to contribute to change Sardinia can be heard.
3. Engagement, widespread in cities and villages: to respond to real territorial needs, starting from the protagonism of the inhabitants, with the help of the communities’ organisers in activating awareness and cooperation processes for local development, social, productive and cultural regeneration.
4. At the service of that Island which already took the right direction, which offers tools and education for the promotion of new relationships among practitioners, exchange and self-help projects against old and new kinds of poverty, synergies among companies to improve and build new market opportunities for their products and services, moments dedicated to knowledge and know-how sharing between those who stay in the Island and those who live outside it, the provision of sharing moments about innovative governmental experiences around the world.
Where we come from
We want to sprout a season of projects for change and for civic commitment to throw away resignation, fear and resentment. We don’t want to testify that we have tried it but convince the majority of the inhabitants of this land to choose to take this path together.
There is who, frightened by this innovative proposal, will try to put it under old and obsolete labels, in order to weaken it. But they won’t succeed as, unlike the guilty people responsible for the economic and social collapse of Sardinia, always dedicated to preserving their own positions and serving irrelevant interests that historically have exploited people and resources, and polluted and plundered territories, we don’t have interests to be safeguarded or profits deriving from key positions to be retained.
We feel as if we are the children of the people that held up this Island: we represent the back to the future of farmers’ industriousness and perseverance, of the sacrifice of generations of shepherds, miners, and workers, of the versatility of our craftsmen, of the beauty that originates from Costantino Nivola or Maria Lai’s hands, of the entrepreneurial bet by Francesca Sanna Sulis and Amsicora Capra, of the resistant-to-injustice soul of Paskedda Zau, of the sentimental education of Peppino Mereu, Montanaru and Sergio Atzeni, of the study able to emancipate and explore our identity of Michelangelo Pira or Nereide Rudas, of the yearning for our land’s freedom and justice of Eleonora d’Arborea and Giovanni Maria Angioy, of the smartness, determination, example of Antonio Gramsci.
We are new, but we are the same as ever. We belong to the history of a proactive population, very rich in values and resources, always on the way for its own dignity. Through new visions and tools, we want to keep on going, opening up a new season for Sardinian democracy, enlivened by those who really care about it. A plural and ambitious voice, harmonic and powerful, as the most beautiful “canto a tenore” still to be imagined.
What we are going to do on the 6th of November
To do what? For one-day discussion in a plenary assembly with workshops aiming to come up with ideas and projects, both in presence and online.
With whom? With whoever feels like it, independently from age and previous experiences, to share competencies, ideas and energy to build an alternative for Sardinia.
How? With round tables adopting highly democratic methods for facilitating the discussion and the decision-making process, by experimenting active participation and co-design approaches that will be replicated in all the areas of Sardinia, to elaborate together, during the next year, a program with projects able to change the Island and, improve our lives, as well.