The professor Michele Capasso - Secretary-General of the "United States of the World" and president of the "Fondazione Mediterraneo" - addressed, as usual, a message for the new year 2023.
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05 December 2023
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
The United States of the World organised the "World Volunteer Day" in various countries.
The coordinator of the "Volunteering and Human Rights" section of the United States of the World, Senator Giuseppe Lumia, spoke at a significant meeting promoted in Padua by the Luciano Tavazza Association and the new European Volunteer Network (Re.V.E., which recalls the French "rêve", i.e. dream).
In Padua, the proposal to amend the Third Sector Code was presented.
A proposal that sums up the discomfort experienced today by the Volunteers of the small but vital groups, which act in local communities, and of the territorial and national Networks, which still have the desire to change the path of humanity through the concrete example of promoting new relationships and sharing with those who live the condition of discomfort, marginalisation and loneliness.
A proposal that has these objectives:
- to overcome the currently asphyxiating excess of bureaucratic and fiscal constraints in the Code on the Third Sector and in particular on organised volunteering.
- make it clear that Volunteering is necessarily free of charge and has exclusive aims of altruity, proximity, education and solidarity in all fields of social and cultural action.
- make it clear that Volunteering must have relations with institutions of "high integration" and not of vassalage or prostration to the powerful.
Modern volunteering is not welfare, it is not called upon to 'plug the holes' produced by society, the economy and politics. Rather, it is a concrete experience that, if done with conscience and preparation, changes the lives of volunteers and supports those profound changes that are needed more than ever within our consciences, in relationships and in the most dramatic situations of human existence, which has to deal with inequalities of all kinds, with devastating wars, with the expansion of substance and behavioural addictions, with the worsening of gender discrimination, which then unleash unspeakable violence, with the spread of mafias, increasingly collusive and powerful, with the still underestimated climate change, just to mention the main crises underway.
Despite the absence of Pope Francesco at COP28, the Faith Pavilion was inaugurated in Dubai with the screening of video messages by Imam Ahmad al-Tayyeb and the Pontiff himself in the presence of Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and Cardinal Miguel Ayuso, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. The UAE Minister for Tolerance and Coexistence, Shaykh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahyan, did the honours at the Pavilion of Faith before presiding with Miguel Moratinos, UN Representative for the Alliance of Civilisations, at the special event of the Global Tolerance Alliance that invited Imam Yahya Pallavicini and Rabbi David Rosen alongside local Coptic Christian and Sikh religious leaders.
After visiting places in the historic centre of Naples, delegates to the UNESCO International Conference "Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century" were welcomed to the United States of the World and the Museum of Peace by Secretary-General Prof. Michele Capasso and other members of the institution.