My name is Giosuè De Salvo. In life, I am an activist and for work, since 2010, I am the responsible for the Advocacy, Education and Campaigns Area in Mani Tese.
After a degree in business economics, two years of strategic advice and a master in international relations, I arrived through an ad on lunaria.org (do you remember?) straight to the heart of the movement said “no global”. It was March 2002, eight months after the G8 meeting in Genoa and one month after the Second World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. I started working at LILA– Italian League for the Fight against AIDS and my boss was Vittorio Agnoletto (do you know?).
Vittorio was the spokesperson of the Genoa Social Forum and one of the Italian members of the international coordination of the FSM/WSF. With him, I have managed cooperation projects in South Africa, I have campaigned against WTO TRIPS and for free access to essential medicines. I worked in the press office and political secretary, taking care of the thousand relationships within the “movement”. Therefore, I continued to do this in 2004 when “we were” elected to the European Parliament and brought the analyses and proposals of the movement into the institutions, helping to make it work as a real collective intellectual.
At the European elections in 2009, however, things did not go well: Vittorio was not re-elected because of the barrage of the list in which he reappeared as an independent. Right at the most exciting moment. Just when we had understood how the EU machine works, we were sent back on this side of the barricade. Not bad. The fight for another possible world can be played at various levels and if you have clear where to go, Mani Tese is the right place to land. Here you can combine commitment and professionalism, you can experiment, you don’t choose opportunistically to make network, here you only conceive yourself as a node of a network and feel intimately and daily that politics “should be done together, everything else is just avarice”. This was said by Don Lorenzo Milani (do you remember him?… I’m sure you do).
