Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, August 20 2019 - Spread culture and promote relationships between citizens of Milanese neighborhoods. This is the purpose of book crossing, an initiative that after the summer will animate all WeMi spaces, the places managed by the Municipality of Milan together with the Third Sector and dedicated to orientation towards services for personal care and well-being. 
The initiative was born from the desire to involve neighborhood users in the activities of the relevant WeMi space - there is at least one in every municipality of the city - with the aim of getting them interested not only in the project but also in its implementation.

Each space will identify and train a group of citizens passionate about reading or with an aptitude for reordering and cataloging who will take care of managing the activity and exchanging books. This same group of people will be hired to create and arrange a bookbox in the designated space, giving free rein to their creativity and imagination. At that point the exchange system will start and will be managed independently by each WeMi with the possibility of rotating the books between the various spaces and giving rise to collaborations with culture-related events held in the city, for example the Book city event.
Each WeMi space will make specific books available, designed for its own target audience. The training of the volunteers who will manage the service and the creation of the bookbox will begin at the end of September, so that the service can be activated in the autumn.

Since 2017, over 19 thousand people have visited WeMi spaces, there have been more than 150 thousand accesses to the platform and more than 700 thousand page views on the portal.

“Promoting sociality in neighborhoods – declares the councilor for social and housing policies Gabriele Rabaiotti – is one of the objectives we set ourselves when the WeMi system of physical spaces was born in 2017. Pursuing that objective by reconciling it with the diffusion of culture and raising awareness of the importance of reading seems to us to be the best way to move forward with a virtuous project that has already achieved important results".

WeMi, the city for welfare.