IULM and PizzAut: on campus the first restaurant within a university run by people with autism
The initiative will bring the third venue of the project founded by Nico Acampora to the campus and is part of a broader path with new training courses dedicated to Disability Management and Inclusive Communication.
IULM University will be the first university to welcome on its campus a PizzAut restaurant, the project founded by Nico Acampora that creates employment opportunities for people with autism .The new restaurant, the first in Milan and the third in the PizzAut network, will be open not only to the university community but to the entire city.
The opening of the restaurant, however, represents only one element of a larger project through which IULM is strengthening its commitment to issues of inclusion, training and the development of new skills. Starting from the next academic year, the University will in fact activate paths dedicated to Disability Management and Inclusive Communication, with the aim of training professionals capable of promoting increasingly inclusive organizational cultures.
The initiative is part of a path that has long seen the University committed to the development of projects capable of combining training, social responsibility and concrete impact on the territory. In this perspective, the collaboration with PizzAut represents a virtuous model that combines labor inclusion, cultural growth and the training of new skills.
The new restaurant will be open not only to the university community, but also to the city. Accessible even in the evening hours, it will contribute to making the campus a meeting and participation space open to the local area. The presence of students will also be enhanced through internship and volunteer activities, creating learning opportunities that combine academic training with direct experience.
"Inclusion - says IULM Rector Professor Valentina Garavaglia - is an experience that is built every day through relationships, expertise and shared work, especially with a good dose of 'heart.' With PizzAut we want to offer another opportunity to apply these principles. To their claim 'we nourish inclusion,' we today pledge to add 'we shape inclusion,' and we will do so with our expertise and all our passion."
" PizzAut is overjoyed by this extraordinary collaboration" -comments PizzAut founder and president Nico Acampora-"Today's college students will be tomorrow's HR managers and entrepreneurs, and if they are nurtured by autistic people today, they will have no problem hiring them in their companies in the future. So the prejudices that are currently still so limiting will be defeated. This is true inclusion."
With this initiative IULM confirms a vision of university education that combines knowledge, social responsibility and concrete impact on society, transforming the campus into a laboratory of inclusion, innovation and participation.