For several years now, we have been working as Strategic Allies within the Mission Fostering Active Participation of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo. In 2023, together with the Mission, we developed a participatory process involving more than 70 partners and stakeholders to co-define words, concepts, and practices across different territories.

We did this through the method of the Emerging Collective Definition, which allowed us to explore, retain, reconsider, and expand possible meanings, and to build a map where language becomes a shared tool for driving cultural transformation for people and places.

This document is the outcome of that participatory process and revolves around the following words: Community and Representation, Involvement and Accessibility, Change and Continuity, Conflict, Intergenerationality, and Co-responsibility.

Because when you use words without inhabiting them, you become their slave. But if you rework them through a collective process, everything changes, and words become platforms for cultural transformation.