The Community Foundation is based in Messina, at the border between Sicily and Calabria, a context of serious socio-economic degradation.

Sicily in 2020 had the second highest unemployment rate in Italy (17.9%), just after Calabria. 22.5% of families live below relative poverty line and 19.2% of economy is black and illegal, putting it among the last positions in European socio-economic rankings.

In addition to this, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council by the end of 2050 200/250 million people worldwide will flee from ecological disasters, with an average of 6 million of men and women forced to leave their homeland every year. Sicily represents a paradigmatic case in this scenario: on the one hand, for its geographical position, it represents a strategic frontier for migration flows; on the other hand, Sicily is subject to desertification processes which might affect 70% of its territory by 2050.

Environmental phenomena, socio-economic trends, social as well as environmental inequalities are nowadays structurally correlated: this turns Sicily into a natural lab for innovative socio-environmental experimentations.