by SARA BERNARDINI – CULTURE
Free to… LIVE is a Global Thinking Foundation initiative to protect women’s financial independence. We talk to founder Claudia Segre to find out more about the project and the phenomenon of financial dependence that afflicts a large percentage of women in our country, and beyond. We discover the foundation’s modus operandi and its next steps.
Interview with the Global Thinking Foundation for Women’s Financial Freedom.
Economic violence perpetuated against women is a silent evil. It creeps into the blanket of relationships and remains hidden there, sometimes even from those directly concerned. It is, in short, the condition that women experience when they are deprived of their financial independence, as they are not authorised, or in any case not in possession of a personal bank account, and thus excluded from monetary management even for themselves.
To find out more, we interviewed Claudia Segre, founder and president of the Global Thinking Foundation, which raises awareness about gender equality in finance. One of her projects, Libere di… VIVERE (Free to… LIVE), tells the story of women’s difficulties through the medium of the graphic novel. Segre told us how the initiative was born, how it is structured, its projects and objectives.
Thank you for accepting this interview for 2duerighe.com. We are here with ‘Libere di… VIVERE’, the social inclusion and gender equality project created by Global Thinking Foundation, the foundation that raises awareness on the issue of men’s economic violence against women. First, I will let you introduce and, if you wish, partly introduce the project.
Good afternoon. Global Thinking Foundation is a non-profit philanthropic foundation that has been working for seven years now to curb the phenomenon of economic violence, and thus financial economic abuse, against women, girls and families. It offers projects and training courses, events, and dissemination activities through digital portals, based on requests we bring to the governments, both Italian and French, and on the results of social impact analysis regarding content and our activities in Italy and France.
When and how did the idea for this foundation come about?
The Foundation was born in 2016, thus in the aftermath of the launch of the 2030 Agenda, with its seventeen sustainability goals revolving around two fundamental axes: the financial flows that support it and Goal 5 on gender equality. It is precisely starting from gender differentials, from the observation of our State as an optimal laboratory for working on gender equality, that all the projects that are now applied on national and French territory were developed.
Can you tell us about specific episodes of women who have experienced and are experiencing this problem?
Yes, unfortunately economic violence strikes across the board, i.e. regardless of one’s social background or age.
We have cases of young girls who go to live together and who, when signing a mortgage, do not realise that they are making a long-term commitment. If, by chance, the person with whom they signed the mortgage leaves them, they effectively remain bad debtors, they find it difficult to meet the commitment, their credit cards are blocked and they go into salary assignment.
Then there are people over fifty who have never had a current account and are faced with a divorce or separation without ever having managed their economic resources, as well as women who are prevented from working, even though, with children approaching adolescence, they would like to do so, and participate in sharing economic and financial choices within the family.
Not to mention the situations arising from fraud, dispossessions, signatures made on surety bonds without being aware of the commitment one is making, or situations arising from deception, such as bitcoin or Ponzi scheme cases, thus situations that find women unaccustomed to certain skills, and exposing themselves to fraud through naivety and inexperience, such as sentimental fraud.
Is your message aimed exclusively at women or would you also include men in similar situations?
We work with both men and women. Right now, because of our model, which sees economic violence as the trigger for other forms of violence, most of the cases that come to our counters are of women. In the last two years we have had more than 450 cases of economic violence alone, and the participants in the courses, which in the last four years have been more than 9,000, only 2,300 last year, are 90 per cent women.
What suggestions do you have for improving the situation?
We have worked on good practices, which we have published on our FamilyMI platform for families (https://www.familymi.com). There you can find advice and answers, for example on what questions to ask your financial advisor, how to approach your bank, as well as the management of personal paperwork, how to keep copies of documents, both your own and those of your children, and to inform yourself before signing any document.
Another aspect is managing one’s current account. We recommend keeping two current accounts, one family account for shared expenses, one personal account with one’s income to avoid future problems. The same goes for the acquisition point of view, such as checking one’s pay slip or maintaining the family budget, avoiding over-indebtedness.
In essence, useful practices for the economic and personal sustainability of women and families.
On the website it says that you have opted for graphic novels to bring younger people closer and speak in a language that is more usable for everyone. What feedback did you get? Do you think this choice has excluded part of your potential target audience?
I don’t think so, because we have several projects for different ages: the FamilyMI platform for families, as well as the YOUNG 612+ platform for younger children (https://www.gltfoundation.com/young-612/). Libere di… VIVERE is a project on diversity & inclusion that started as an educational method with graphic novels at its centre. We are all connected to a comic strip in our lives, regardless of generation, whether it is Mafalda, Valentina or Black Widow, and in fact in our comic strips the depiction and the stories we tell are about women who, thanks to their spirit of economic independence, managed to change the reality in which they lived. We succeed in involving both boys and girls, as well as families, precisely because graphic novels are a language that transcends boundaries and generational differences. Moreover, the message that we propose is the observation not only of the depiction of women in comics, with our 3D museum, but also of more recent stories, such as that of Katherine Johnson, one of the NASA women who designed the trajectories to go to Mars, or the painter Tamara de Lempicka, as an expression of an artistic spirit that goes beyond gender. These are all important reflections towards society to be brought to children as an intergenerational dialogue, in families and with the new generations.
We usually receive requests from municipalities, or from an anti-violence centre or association. So we address that community by bringing our docufilm Libere di… VIVERE (https://www.liberedivivere.com/libere-di-vivere-il-docufilm/), the graphic novels and we extend the work by starting with the citizenship, with the events and the exhibition, and then moving on to the schools. So it is an itinerary that is built step by step, and we are in our fourth year. In these four years we have had over 80,000 digital and 36,000 physical participants, which means we have passed through over 80 municipalities across the country and also made four stops in France.
One last question: what goals have you achieved and what do you plan to achieve in the future?
Certainly all our projects are subjected to social impact analysis, and what we have seen is the change triggered in the increased awareness of one’s own economic self-determination, the search for independence that becomes the ability to make a free choice. As the title says, “free to…” do many things, such as deciding to go to work, to buy a financial product, to do with one’s life what one wants by following an economic path that is above all conscious, sustainable and also shared when within a family economy.
Thank you for this pleasant chat and for the interesting insights. I would like to remind you that, for those interested in the project, the site where you can find all the information is liberedivivere.com. Good luck for everything and see you next time.
Thank you for the opportunity, see you next time.
