Milano

CONTINA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE ONLUS

CONTINA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE ONLUS

Ragione Sociale
CONTINA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE ONLUS
Provincia
Sede
Cascina Contina - 20088, Rosate (MI)
Telefono / Cellulare
02 90849494
Fax
02 90849493
Referente
Dolores Gariboldi

Who we are

The social cooperative Contina is a mixed social cooperative:

  • a type A cooperative, aiming at residential assistance to disadvantaged people
  • a type B cooperative, aiming at occupational inclusion. In this perspective it wants to respond to disadvantaged situations, through community life and occupational inclusion.

The cooperative’s philosophy is to offer young people in distress an opportunity to experience community life and to restore cultural traditions and roots. This is one of the reasons why the cooperative chose to live in a rural area and more specifically in a farmstead, a place of “poverty and effort”, in which one can abandon the presumption of having a prepared solution for all problems, while also choosing to centre the offer on reviving artisanal work.
The innovation in creating this cooperative is to create, in wider and more complex environments, a possible coexistence of different marginality issues, especially caring for drug addicted or HIV infected individuals, and with foreign and Italian minors coming chiefly from prisons or problematical families.

Activities

In the last years, farming grew more and more important, both in a social and therapeutical perspective, for its economical and ethic role in guaranteeing “food and nutrition”to the community hosted at the rural centre, apart from offering a professional training service that can lead to the growth of professional skills and to the knowledge of specific agricultural techniques:

  • cultivation of fruits and vegetables
  • Breeding of chickens, ducks, gooses, turkeys and guinea-hens, rabbits, pork and bovines.
  • Dog training centre
  • Since June 2011, the cooperative develops, with the coordination of Milan’s Parco Agricolo Sud park, various initiativesto promote awareness and environmental education and organises promotional, recreational, cultural and educational activities

The “Dulcis in forno” workshop was created from direct contacts with the local farmers in the Parco Agricolo Sud and Parco del Ticino, which carefully produce and cultivate their products with organic or in-transition methods and which are keen on preserving the local soil and landscape. Along with them and with the Parco Agricolo Sud di Milano DESR (“Distretto di Economia Solidale Rurale”, Rural and Fair Economy District) the cooperative is trying to experiment a new short-distribution fair trade economy, where every actor contributes to the production chain why producing a “zero km” products and directly selling them to ethical purchasing groups, to local agritourism and quality markets.
In this production chain, our cooperative produces biscuits, natural leavened bread and cakes produced in natural ways and hand packed. We also produce some varieties of transformed products both from vegetables (red onions jam, marinated aubergines and peppers) and fruits (various jams, including Brunedo Alp mountain blackberries). We also produce Vegan products with no eggs or animal derived ingredients.
The Cascina Contina offers a “social catering” service to private people, companies, associations, private parties or other special occasions such as business meeting, baptisms and weddings.