Strategies to fight poverty in Italy: professional social work and Third sector

The aim of this work is to represent, from a series of plural and scientifically integrated perspectives, the multidimensional phenomenon of poverty, understood in its different meanings and nuances as well as in its dynamics of evolutionary complexity. For this reason, the paper will be introduced by an in depth statistical analysis, capable of explaining its dimensions in terms of breadth, intensity, diffusion and definition (in terms of absolute and relative poverty) in the national framework, and then open the topic to its further theoretical, epistemological and operational expressions, in specific relation to the values, actions and interventions implemented by the professional social service system, with its welfarist response strategies to the challenges produced by social change and its ramifications of the different forms of poverty that are part of the dynamics of enforceability of rights and the recognition of the new social risks of complex society. Finally, the work articulates and deepens the increasingly close and consistent relationship between professional social services and the Third Sector, also in light of recent regulatory and legislative adjustments which have promoted a new protagonism of the social private sector in the sphere of planning, planning and provision of interventions and services to the person, under the aegis of the welfare partnership.