Freedom to Change the World: The Concept Note for the 2025 Bertinoro Days

A significant anniversary. An even greater challenge. The Bertinoro Days for the Civil Economy are 25 years old, and like any self-respecting ritual, they don't simply celebrate the past: they honor it by projecting themselves into the future.

This special edition is not just a milestone, but a starting point : an opportunity to reaffirm the civil economy as a method for addressing—and above all, inhabiting—reality in its entirety. Because living is not just surviving. And because today, more than ever, what's at stake is freedom.

In a time marked by mistrust and fragmentation, where uncertainty breeds fear and fear breeds closure, freedom risks becoming an empty word, reduced to the defense of one's own borders or an individual claim . But authentic freedom—the kind that transforms, innovates, and generates the future —is something entirely different. It is the freedom to : create connections, build just institutions, regenerate territories and the happiness of those who live there. To change the world and address the causes that generate inequality.

This is the horizon of the 25th edition of the GdB: a collective journey that questions how to make freedom generative, orienting it towards the common good.

It's not enough to be free from constraints, nor simply free to choose. We need a freedom that has a purpose, a shared goal. We need freedom for . And we need the courage to ask ourselves: what are we truly free for?

To be complete, freedom must be embodied in concrete challenges. The 2025 GoB proposes three directions:

• A new humanism of work : recognizing work not just as a source of income, but as a need for expression, connection, and transformation. Work that gives meaning, nourishes identity, and builds community and competitiveness.
• Critical thinking and artificial intelligence : in an era dominated by algorithms and post-truth, the Third Sector and the Social Economy must safeguard freedom of thought, defend democracy, and promote pluralism and responsibility.
• Redesigning ecosystems and making room for desire : putting desire back at the center of policies and development. Because without desire, there is no innovation, no change, no happiness. We need to restructure networks, connections, and ecosystems capable of sharing common means and goals. The rift between gift and market must be healed.

The civil economy is the framework within which these challenges intertwine. It is a paradigm capable of restoring depth to collective action, of restoring dialogue between means and ends, of building alliances between people, territories, and institutions.

It is an economy founded on relationships, shared responsibility, and participation. An economy that does not repair damage, but generates abundance. That does not chase emergencies, but nurtures community initiative. That does not settle for the possible, but dares to desire the impossible. This is why there can be no true progress without the contribution of the third pillar : that of the social economy and the Third Sector. An area in which, more than anywhere else, the value of the individual—and therefore of their integral freedom—is recognized, cultivated, and placed at the center.

Without this dimension of freedom , social innovation risks becoming merely aesthetic: an adaptive response that improves the existing without truly transforming it. It is only in local institutions, in vibrant and participatory communities, that social innovation becomes a generative force, capable of impacting the structure of inequalities and opening up new spaces for citizenship.

The Bertinoro Days are not a conference. They are a community ritual that each year calls us to think together, to engage without filters, to emerge more courageous and motivated in building the common good. They are a space for collective creativity, where theory and practice, academia and action, utopia and concreteness meet. Where freedom is not just a theme, but a method.

For those who want, we'll see you at the Rocca di Bertinoro on October 10-11!

To download the Concept Note of the 25th edition here

Opening: Bertinoro Fortress, all images from the Press Office