A social agriculture, health, and social services: building systems to challenge the pandemic

The existing definitions in the literature that attempt to give a frame to the term of social innovation are many, demonstrating how complex it is to draw analytical boundaries to a phenomenon whose essential characteristics are manifested in everyday practices. A definition that outlines the relationship between social innovation and social agriculture is that contained in the "White Paper on social innovation:" we define social innovations as new ideas (products, services and models) that satisfy social needs more effectively than existing alternatives and that at the same time create new relationships and new collaborations. In other words, innovations that are good for society and that increase the possibilities for action for society itself. " In the current economic and social scenario, the search for inclusive, intelligent and sustainable innovation paths is one of the main strategic objectives of the EU2020 strategy of the European Commission. The attention for these practices is growing in the territories, by virtue of the needs linked to the continuous contraction of public resources, even more accentuated by two years of pandemic crisis, which has deteriorated the public capacity for intervention, in particular in the large and articulated area of personal services. These phenomena occur in a particularly evident way in rural areas, where depopulation reduces the possibility of developing circular economies, of ensuring the necessary generational turnover and of providing services and tools necessary to favor the permanence on the territory of elderly people and new settlements of young people. However, the emergency we are experiencing has once again given impetus to the issues of health, food, safety and food self-sufficiency in the country and has highlighted, such as the spirit of initiative and the ability to adapt shown by agricultural entrepreneurs, together with the wealth of experience gained over the years by thousands of multifunctional companies, they represent fundamental resources for the restart of the country. The Europe 2020 strategy aims to allow the European Union to achieve smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The objective of this contribution is to consider social agriculture from the point of view of its relationship with the system of social and socio-health services and trying to avoid social agriculture activities to simple day or residential cycle services, but of considering the paths that farms can activate with social and socio-health services as resources for territorial welfare, also in light of the interventions envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).