(ANSA) – AMELIA (TERNI), 12 AUG – It is a “changed” Comunità Incontro as its founder Don Pierino Gelmini wanted, the one that remembers the tenth anniversary of its founder’s death. “We have succeeded, maintaining the educational system, in building a path through the new addictions, behavioral and substance-related” explained Giampaolo Nicolasi, the head of the structure, to ANSA.
Today this reality, which symbolically started in Rome on February 13, 1963 with the meeting in Piazza Navona between ”the don” and Alfredo Nunzi, the first boy assisted, has about ten residential and reception facilities in Italy, support groups in practically every region (made up of volunteers and boys who have completed the community program) and operational facilities in Bolivia and Costa Rica. “In Italy, between reception and residence, we are around 400 people assisted” said Nicolasi. “In addition to them, there are many people subjected to precautionary measures, even in prisons, who we assist with our staff” he added.
“My memory of Don Pierino – said Nicolasi - is of a person who made possible what seemed impossible. Believing in man, despite everything, and giving everyone a chance to rebuild their lives. On an operational, entrepreneurial level, he was a visionary who knew how to look beyond the wall and intuit things that not everyone could perceive. And this helped him in the development of the Community, starting from a limited group of people and from economic resources that were there and were not there”.
Giampaolo Nicolasi himself explains what happened in these ten years without Don Pierino. “In the last years of his life – he said -, despite the illness having limited his operations, he had perceived that a change was needed, that it was necessary to adapt to the new dependencies. He told me ‘Giampaolo, you will make this change'”. (ANSA).