Resilienza comunitaria e vulnerabilità sociale nella prospettiva del Welfare Responsabile

The recent pandemic as a widespread social crisis shows the social relevance of resilience, e.g. the capacity of deal with unfavorable events through a flexible approach. Recent studies on resilience underline the ability of the social context to activate resilience: that is the community resilience. A concept linked to the resilience is vulnerability, e.g. the presence of properties that make people and communities less able to cope with risks. In this paper, we will consider vulnerability and resilience as linked each other: it means that in many cases increasing community resilience can reduce community vulnerability. The model of Responsible Welfare, with its characteristics elements, offers useful indications to improve the community resilience, because it acts both on the structural elements of the social system (for example, to reduce inequalities) and at the same time on the process ones. More precisely, the Responsible Welfare model has the advantage of emphasizing the skills of several social actors involved in the production of well-being. The presence of this plurality of subjects seems to show the effect of empowering each actor who chooses to be responsible. For that reason, the process elements of community resilience (the activity named community empowerment) are able to reinforce the structural elements of resilience, realizing an empowered community. These reinforced structural elements represent resources that the community can use to more and more improve its well-being, creating a virtuous cycle.