It takes a neighborhood to fight educational poverty: resilient ‘educating communities’ in times of multiple crises

The need to deal with multiple challenges (the Global Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic) stimulated a renewed policy focus on children’s conditions, rights, and well-being, along with innovations in the contents, approaches, planning, and governance arrangements of interventions. This chapter draws on a collaborative research experience developed within a program to fight educational poverty and strengthen the ‘educating community’ in a deprived neighborhood in Milan, Italy. This single-case analysis aims at investigating the conditions of implementation and disentangling potentialities and criticalities of place-based interventions. While solid pre-existing relations among the local actors and effective tools for project governance allowed the resilience of the network in the face of the unprecedented pandemic conditions, criticalities such as the discontinuity of resources and the turnover of persons in charge threatened the long-term sustainability and call for effective strategies to further underpin place-based networks and programs.