La Cooperativa Lazzarelle

The Cooperative Lazzarelle is a social enterprise that, using the approach of diversity management engages as members and workers women in prisons for entrepreneurial activities. Now it is involved in coffee production within the female prison of Pozzuoli (NA - IT). It was born in 2010, by the belief that prisons should not be a dark and forgotten place. We trust that it is always possible, even under the most difficult conditions, that women are the protagonists of their changing.

The Cooperative Lazzarelle promotes the creation of innovative approach to entrepreneurship and self-employment of women, to respond to two different types of problems.

First, groped to solve the serious problem of unemployed and underemployed women; secondly, encouraging the raising of social enterprises able to offer and deliver innovative services to the territory.

The perspective and orientation of the cooperative idea is mainly to have a greater focus on the reality of imprisonment, in the direction of social change: accompaniment to (re)entering the labor market, promoting new forms, such as business creation and self-employment, attempting to prevent or halt the processes and conditions that generate forms of poverty.

The project was born like a collect of actions, methods, interventions and services to support disadvantaged women in training programs; the main objective is to facilitate the employment the women prisoners.

When we decided to create a cooperative made up of female prisoners we wanted to achieve three main goals:

1. create a concrete work occasion for women

2. promote a sustainable and fair local development

3. arrange new social business ideas