COVID-19 | EMERGENCY COMES TO NAPLES WITH MORE FOOD AND GOODS TO TACKLE NEWFOUND POVERTY

28,000 food packs delivered, 640 working volunteers and 1,740 households helped. Those are the figures for ‘Nobody left behind – Supporting those in need through unprecedented times’, EMERGENCY’s project to tackle the newfound poverty after the pandemic by handing out free food and basic goods.

Having sprung up in Milan, Rome and Piacenza, now ‘No one left out’ has come to Naples, thanks to help from the Spesa Sospesa project, the city council and the associations Lab00 and Comitato Popolare per la rinascita di Soccavo.

‘Eurostat’s Regional Yearbook report for 2020 says that two in five people in Campania are at risk of dropping into poverty. The main reason for that is a new category of people, who until now used to work cash-in-hand or do odd jobs, so they aren’t on the radar for traditional or state help. That’s why it was essential that we brought our charity to one of the cities hardest hit by the economic crisis that has followed the pandemic. We’d already been working here for many years at our clinic in Ponticelli, which gives basic and specialist medical services, health education and socio-medical information, to help people get into the health system if they need it,’ says Rossella Miccio, president of EMERGENCY.

Every household we help through ‘Nobody left behind’ gets a food pack every week, the size depending on how many people live there, plus a pack of cleaning products and one of personal care products every month.

‘We’re starting off in Naples with about 100 households in the neighbourhoods of Pianura, Soccavo and Ponticelli, near our clinic for migrants and poor people, but soon we’ll be ready to help up to 500 families,’ says Peppino Fiordelisi, coordinator of EMERGENCY’s volunteers in Campania. ‘People who were working in pizzerias or restaurants, perhaps cash-in-hand, have seen their livelihoods go up in smoke. Sadly there are a lot of families where both parents have lost all their sources of income and are finding themselves struggling to make ends meet.’

We could not have done our ‘Nobody left behind’ project in Italy without the help of a network of associations, local councils and independent groups of people in every city, who took on the task of finding people who needed packs and delivering them to them.

In Naples we started ‘Nobody left behind’ with the help of spesasospesa.org, which used its blockchain platform ‘Regusto’ to collect 160,000 euros to buy goods that EMERGENCY volunteers then gave out to households.

Like in other cities, EMERGENCY’s volunteers will go about in pairs with badges. They will all be given special training to help minimise the risk of the disease spreading between them and the people they are helping.

To tell someone about people who need help you can go straight to Naples council’s social services, while Milan and Piacenza have special numbers, +39 02 863166890 and +39 347 2221241 respectively. In Rome you can tell the councils that are already running a service (namely I, VI and VII).

This project was also made possible by generous companies donating their products to EMERGENCY.