Osservatorio Popolare QuBì (QuBì – People’s Watch) is a collective process allowing for community networks to take the floor and speak about poverty and child poverty. It is a reflexive process to ask – and ask ourselves – what poverty is and how we can confront it. It is a workshop in speaking up, to allow for the emersion of everybody’s voice and point of view, especially of children and young people.

In particular, Osservatorio Popolare develops collaborative research activities with the networks of the QuBì project, in order to:

• Facilitate the emersion of different experiences and points of view on the topics of child poverty and of the vulnerability of families within the QuBì program, with a specific focus on those needs and issues which lay unseen, under-represented, unrecognised;
• Promote discussion between inhabitants, volunteers, activists and social workers from the neighbourhood and the representatives of the organisations composing the network, to generate new understandings of poverty in the neighbourhood, informed by different life-stories, age groups, cultural backgrounds and social conditions.

Within the observatory, different initiatives have been developed:

• Lab days: day workshops to generate new understandings of poverty in the neighbourhood, with social workers, volunteers, activists and inhabitants;
• Processes of participative research with children, young adults, families and social workers to facilitate the emersion of a wide array of experiences and points of views on some research interests of the QuBì networks;
• Quantitative research, to gather new data for a better description and understanding of aspects of the well-being of those minors accessing services and activities promoted by the program.

The Observatory is promoted by Codici, within the framework of the QuBì program, and is the outcome of the collaboration started in 2019-20 with the QuBì networks of the Barona, Gallaratese, Loreto, and Via Padova neighbourhoods in Milan.

Photo ☉☉ NASA/Aubrey Gemignani