The visits scheduled in the Livorno programme, focusing on different ways to implement empowerment were made to the “Women's House”, based in Livorno, and to the NGO “Big Fish”, base in Marina di Pisa in the seaside area of the city.

Women's House is a shelter house for women living in difficult situations (related with different problems), run by the nationwide NGO network called ARCI and active in the city from more than 15 years. It works in close relation with the institutional health and welfare system, and in the last years tried to respond in first place to the emerging housing needs of women. Empowerment techniques
here are used mainly to help clients gain back their autonomy (health, mental disorder, labour/job, legal issues, addiction, social housing, family, etc.), through self-confidence building processes based on self-help and educational relationships with the workers. The final objec-tive is always the return to a full autonomous life, so every project is “tailored” on the specific situation and needs of each host.

Big Fish is a project run by the social promotion NGO “L'Alba” (the dawn), that works mainly on psychosocial integration of people with a (present or past) diagnosis of mental disorder, considered first as persons and secondly as citizens. L'Alba does various activi-ties, which includes cultural and recreational events, training, social promotion and art and labour work-shops. In particular, Big Fish is a project of job/labour training and reinsertion, based on a restaurant and on a beach resort run, both at a very high professional level, by the “clients” of the NGO with the workers supervision.