The “Community House”, one of the temporary uses planned for Milan’s pilot, is conceived as a symbolic space gathering the multitude of actors within and outside MIND to foster collaboration, especially between business and non-profit organisations.

In this vein, the Community House intends to show the value of building collaborative governance and management models that can be adapted to host different events, initiatives and services jointly conceived by a mix of internal and external stakeholders at MIND.

As a demonstrator of the type of synergies that can be created and promoted through the Community House, Milan’s local coalition has co-designed with a selected tenant and a local organisation a joint initiative addressed at the communities living in the territory around MIND, particularly young people between 18 and 25 years old.

Through a co-design process facilitated by the local coalition, a project agreement has been reached between ROLD, a manufacturing company located at MIND who devotes a specific program to lifelong learning, and CoopeRho, a consortium of social cooperatives from the northwest of Milan. Under the overarching concept of the Community House, the two subjects have joined forces to realise a career guidance event series on emerging technologies to help young people orient their path across future professions. The career guidance event series, which will take place in May 2023, consist of a series of “training pills” for young people living in the northwest area of Milan, who are concluding their education journey and/or are currently unemployed. The series has the three-fold goal of stimulating interest in the skills needed for future professions, orienting (and possibly reorienting) their career path, and supporting potential projects and business ideas.

The pills will consist of theoretical/practical moments in which participants will engage and be coached by technology experts on the topics of ‘Artificial Intelligence’, ‘Industry 4.0 and 5.0’, ‘Rapid Prototyping’ and ‘New Generation Materials’.

The public announcement of the initiative was given via CoopeRho channels at the end of January. This first announcement will be soon followed by a call for participation published on the pilot’s website at the beginning of March.

In the upcoming months, the local coalition will also work with MIND’s stakeholders (for example, Fondazione Triulza) and the partners of T-Factor’s consortium to define a governance and business model that can emerge from the Community House experience and can sustain its future developments, proposing other joint initiatives between internal and external actors of the innovation district.