Riace: Mimmo lucano and his model of hospitality

The Riace model of the mayor Domenico Lucano is a very controversial reality.

With his model the mayor of Riace divided the Italian population in two, among those who claim that it is a winning model and those who find it an illegal model.

Everything comes from a personal vision of Mimmo Lucano: the classic model of reception for the mayor of Riace and for many Italians does not work because it causes a ghettoization of non-EU citizens who end up living with assistance without any prospect of having a future.

Domenico Lucano is the one who invented the “Riace model”, a method of hospitality management whose echo has rebounded all over the world, even reaching the ears of Fortune magazine, which in 2016 puts it on the list of the 50 most influential leaders at world.

But what does the “Riace method” consist of?

It is nothing but a sort of reorganization of funds and the involvement of the enormous human resource resulting from the dramatic landings on the Italian coast. The transformation of a problem into a solution.

The migrants to Riace stop being a burden to become the engine of a moribund economy; are not housed in crumbling barracks or in those famous hotels easy argumentation of a certain part, but in abandoned houses of a village soon became a wonderful oasis of interculturality.

The Riace method by Mimmo Lucano provides for the socio-economic management of migrants, who are made committed and productive citizens. The 35 euro per capita for the support of refugees and asylum seekers are transformed into so-called “job grants” that are turned into cooperatives, which also include the citizens of Riace, which give the opportunity for these men and women to learn a job that you assure him a small salary. A network of affiliated businesses has also been set up that allows migrants to provide for their household salary with that salary.

The Riace method works so well and is so engaging that many of them decide to continue their lives there, in an area increasingly abandoned by the natives, and in doing so also the cohabitation with the regiacians is peaceful and total integration. But the money needed to fuel the engine of this machine come with increasingly significant delays and the mayor Lucan, also called “Mimmo ‘u Kurd”, again makes a virtue of necessity inventing a virtual local currency, spendable only to Riace, made of banknotes depicting the face of characters like Peppino Impastato, Che Guevara or Mahatma Gandhi, but it is a precarious balance, the money still does not arrive.

The problem of the Riace model is unfortunately born in the accounts that Mimmo Lucano would have to give money spent.

Among the accusations is the failure to report some expenses, there are contracts with operators and cultural mediators, relations with local associations and even non-payment of taxes on identity cards “.

Apart from any criminal findings to be assessed two are the objections that can be made to this absolutely innovative model:

– Is it correct to use funds destined for a specific purpose in a better but wrong way? Would not it have been better to agree on this new model with who gave the funds?
This question obviously opens up various scenarios: the lengths of an answer that would have been paid by migrants on the one hand and on the other, the acceptance at European level of a very specific and not easily replicable model.

– Does the model have a valid cost-benefit ratio? It’s never nice to talk about money when it comes to human lives, but is there a balance of how much this model worked or did other better models exist?

If the model of classic reception is inefficient and not only in reality as small as Riace, because only Mimmo Lucano seems to have tried to do something while those who should create integration in Europe seem to worry more than anything else to hide the dust under the carpet?