Comunità Frizzante
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Project Description
Comunità Frizzante literally means “sparkling community”. Our slogan is “making drinks to make community”. We are a diverse network of organisations and people passionate about the Vallagarina valley in the Italian Alps. We activate joyful participatory processes around the invention, branding, hand-crafting and selling of fizzy drinks with delicious yet thought-provoking flavours. By doing so, we reshape the way we live, make community and do economy in our valley and beyond.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
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Description of the project
Summary
Comunità Frizzante literally means “sparkling community”. Our slogan is “making drinks to make community”. We are a diverse network of organisations and informal groups who are passionate about the Vallagarina valley in the Italian Alps. We want to catalyse the way we live, make community and do economy in our valley and beyond. Since 2019, we are working on inventing, branding, hand-crafting and selling non alcoholic fizzy drinks with delicious yet thought-provoking flavours. In each step of the drinks cycle we focus on participation, conviviality and ecological respect: from ideation and production to circulation and reinvestment. Our drinks production is a tool to cultivate relationships, stimulate ecological knowledge and increase the sense of belonging both to the Vallagarina valley and a larger community of citizens using inventive as well as solidary ways to address the ecological and social challenges of our times.
We mobilise the participatory production of fizzy drinks to challenge individualised ways of life, highly extractivist value chains and alienation from the mountains we live in. Since we started in 2019, the drinks have proven a great tool for investigating and challenging destructive economic practices: with our cola, we inquire together with teenagers into the politics of multinational food corporations; with our orangeade - produced from the left-over orange pulp from an organic bakery making candied fruit - we support the fight against hyper-exploitative labour of undocumented workers in the orange production cyle in Southern Italy; with our grapes and elderflower drink, we question the grapes monocultures invading our valleys, while campaigning for regenerative agricultural practices. Moreover, with our participatory activities along the whole cycle of production and circulation of the drinks, we have created an inspiring example of how inventive activities of social inclusion can create a strong sense of belonging and empowerment.
Key objectives for sustainability
We focus on sustaining agricultural practices that foster biodiversity and source all ingredients from project partners and producers with high ecological as well as social standards, who place care for the soil and the ecosystem at the center of their work.
In terms of reducing our material and greenhouse gas footprint, we experiment with circularity as a principle. For example by using grapes and orange pulp for two of our bottled drinks that are recovered as surplus from other food production cycles and went to waste until we stepped in. We also focus on short paths for sourcing primary materials and for selling our drinks, many of which we undertake with our shared cargobike. We also share the food production laboratory with a social cooperative and our social co-production space with a community academy, thus mobilising the power of shared infrastructures.
To engage the community in our sustainability journey, we run guided walks to teach about the plants and ecosystems in our valley. By doing so we heighten attention to food that can be foraged, the ecological impact of diverse agricultural practices and humans’ role in keeping ecosystems in balance. We also run numerous drinks workshops in schools and community events each year during which we focus on producing ad hoc drinks with experimental flavours with foraged herbs as well as with waste fruit and vegetables sourced from local markets and producers in order to speak about food production and sustainability. Our team members all live low consumption lifestyles and actively promote them to foster regenerative processes that connect people with the valley and its inhabitants.
Comunità Frizzante can be exemplary for building on resources available locally, for its approach to shared production facilities, and for its “sparkling” way to engage local inhabitants in transformative, communal production activities. These are all replicable and as well as transferable to other sectors.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
We approach aesthetics and quality of experience in a multidimensional and multi-sensorial way. First of all, we focus on creating participatory activities and community events that are joyful, engaging and accessible, while interacting with the mountain landscape we live in. Of these we then tell visual stories that celebrate our territory’s beauty in terms of ecological and social diversity.
When it comes to the taste of our drinks, we define them in convivial workshops during which community members are invited to experiment with a wide range of flavours we have captured in syrups through previous participatory activities. With tastes ranging from grapes to junipers, from cucumbers to mulberries, we invite people to stimulate their taste buds in surprising and thought-provoking ways as each taste comes with its own story of agro-ecological processes. The best mixes and most promising stories then become bottled drinks. To our and the community’s pride, our drinks are highly valued by experts and have been included in numerous guides about the best tastes of Italy.
When it comes to the visual aesthetics of our drinks, it is also co-produced. The name and label of our cola was co-designed with a youth center working especially with children with migrant background; the name and label of our grapes drink was co-designed in collaboration with a community academy at our local train station; the name and label of our orangeade was co-created during the first Covid-19 lockdown in a series of online workshops with people from Northern and Southern Italy. Our volunteering local graphic designer gives the final touches to the labels and makes sure that the design stays vernacular but can stand with ease besides mainstream brands.
Comunità Frizzante can be exemplary in the way it mobilises transdisciplinary and local knowledge and uses art and design to inventively combine these into aesthetic experiences that engage all the senses in creating a new sense of belonging.
Key objectives for inclusion
Our whole production and distribution cycle is based on participatory engagement with a wide range of local groups, from kids in youth centers to people in elderly homes, from activist organic farmers to people with physical and cognitive disabilities. We structure participatory activities to be inclusive and to speak to a wide range of interests, from coming up with ideas for flavours to foraging trips, from convivial bottling sessions to deciding how to reinvest our surplus.
Our special beneficiaries are people experiencing social exclusion: with the participatory activities in our valley we continue to create occasions for socialising that break down stereotypes and undo stigmatisation. Since 2019, we have involved 3000 people in over 80 participatory workshops focused on social inclusion that we organised in collaboration with over 60 different formal and informal citizen groups.
The materiality of the drinks benefits visionary small-scale farmers and the fairly paid workers they employ, especially with our orangeade, whose oranges are produced by the cooperative SOS Rosarno, which fights against the hyper-exploitation of African migrant workers in Southern Italy. The bottling, taking place in the artisanal food lab of the social cooperative Gruppo 78, also involves people who are finding their way back into society.
We as young, mainly female professionals are also beneficiaries: the project allows us to do inspiring, socially and ecologically beneficial work, while making a living in the valley rather than migrating to cities. We then also train other young people and create an empowering environment for more initiatives to grow.
Through the entanglement of these spheres we create hope that other ways of working and doing economy are possible. We think that through this we contribute to a larger social movement that benefits people and the planet by showing that the economy is what we make of it.
Results in relation to category
The project started from a group of people working since 2017 on establishing a community academy at our local train station. But as this process has been incredibly slow (with the opening taking place only in mid-2021), we channeled our energies into a community drinks project. Inspired and supported by our friends of Company Drinks in London and Cube Cola in Bristol, in 2018 we imagined how we could produce the non-alcoholic drinks for our future community events at the train station, while using the drinks production process as a means to make community.
Through Comunità Frizzante, we have created a shared sense of belonging and purpose between local actors who usually don’t easily join forces, for example: young feminist changemakers with sparkling ideas with long consolidated social cooperatives holding food production facilities, the Social Services with cultural associations focused on contemporary culture and social innovation, people battling with social exclusion with enticing sustainability ambassadors. These connections have unearthed resources and potentials that none of these actors could have imagined on their own and together we created a project with a stupendous regenerative force of community-making.
The project has benefitted from a small grant by the local bank foundation Caritro (Jan 2019 to Jan 2021), but above all from drawing on the enormous, yet often unvalued, wealth of knowledge and resources that all project partners have unearthed to support a shared ambition for putting a convivial and collaborative spark back into our local community.
So far, we have trained 13 other young people in our community economies approach and run life projects with 6 higher education institutes. We also support other social regeneration projects with our time and expertise, for example: the ideation and experimentation with an (un)school for mental health and a garden club with asylum seekers to allow for the building up of supportive social relations.
How Citizens benefit
Comunità Frizzante is a project by civil society, which has gradually gained the support by local administrations, social cooperatives accredited to deliver mental health services and multiple actors of the food economy. The project is the result of a collaboration between (initially) 14 partners: ranging from a community garden to a community academy, from social cooperatives to operators of the local science museum, from the cinema club to a youth club, from a sustainable tourism company to an organic farm. Moreover, the project was co-designed with translocal partners making participatory drinks and DIY cola syrup in the UK.
It is now led by an interdisciplinary 4-people strong team of mainly female professionals, half of whom are below the age of 30 (social worker, artist, socal designer, agroecologist). This core team is supported in the co-creation processes by a nurtured group of volunteers, ranging from engaged community members (many of which are recovering from social exclusion) to professionals (e.g. herb experts, beverage expert, farmer, graphic designer, social economist, traders). Over time, the network has been expanded to and now comprises also a local bakery, an organic and fair trade orange producer from Southern Italy as well as over 40 circulation points throughout Italy, who are all part of telling the story of local development and social inclusion.
Comunità Frizzante has been proven a fantastic tool to engage public institutions such as the municipality of Rovereto (40,000 inhab.) and the valley district administration into a process of innovation around how public services but also local development plans are being developed as well as delivered.
The fact that Comunità Frizzante is driven by a diverse range of civic actors, enhances its long-term sustainability as its members are happy to think creatively to mobilize a multiplicity of resources and support structures to guarantee its continuation.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
The innovative character of Comunità Frizzante weaves through multiple spheres: inclusive community building, fizzy drinks production, sustainable local development and economic practices.
In terms of inclusive community building, the project mobilises the drinks production as a tool to bring diverse people together for explorative and creative activities. Through the drinks, the project is concrete, fun, inclusive, multisensorial and multisectorial. In our participatory methods we have been inspired by the work our project partner Company Drinks does in Barking, London, and have vernacularly adapted them to the alpine context.
When it comes to the bottling of the drinks, we learnt from bigger scale producers and have then DIY engineered a tiny-scale production line. This makes us the smallest fizzy drinks producers in Italy, if not in Europe, and allows us to make our production a truly communal process and to also produce tiny runs of special flavours. For now we produce 14,000 bottles per year.
In terms of sustainable local development, the drinks help us to open up conversations with usually excluded actors: everyone feels they have something to say about how our drinks should taste and look like, but also where it should be possible to buy them and who should be able to afford them. This makes the drinks a fantastic means to think together about how our valley should develop and what life in it should feel like.
The project is led by a small, young and mainly female team inspired by feminist and ecolgoical approachs to community building, local development and the economy. We thus experiment with horizontal participatory processes and with how to make decision as inclusive as possible. We also experiment with how to practice the economy in ways that value what is usually marginalised: volunteer work, waste products, bartering and gift exchanges, make-shift arrangements, taking mistakes as moments of collective learning.
Learning transferred to other parties
There is a high potential for transferring the project’s learnings and results as they revolved around a concrete production process. In fact, many other products could be at the center of a participatory process that creates a sense of belonging to the community, the territory but also to ecological processes more generally. For Comunità Frizzante the process of producing fizzy drinks allows for participatory investigations of the processes, infrastructures, local as well as global economic dynamics, ingredients, materials that make it up. It also allows for multiple entry points: for community members, public administrators, farmers, entrepreneurs, social workers, artists, researchers.
To work on knowledge transfer, we are part of an international alliance of community economies initiatives, which we co-founded in 2019: The Interdependence. This is a space where we share strategies of participatory action and community-led development especially in relation to creating economies and economic processes that reframe economic thinking and practice in order for it to create beneficial effects and a strong sense of belonging and community for all the actors involved.
In 2021, Comunità Frizzante has been awarded international recognition with the Lush Spring Prize, which champions projects dedicated to social and ecological regeneration. Here we have been the only European project out of 20 award winners. We are also a frequent case study for research projects focusing on how global challenges can be tackled with local, community-led solutions (e.g. Alpine Community Economies Lab, Co-Fresh, Diverse Food Economies), while we also frequently speak at events focused on youth and community-led entrepreneurship. In 2020, Comunità Frizzante has been at the center of the Italian TV documentary series Green Storytellers, which allowed us to share our participatory processes and ethos with a wide national audience.
