Giulia and the Path of Volunteering

COMMITTED TO HELPING OTHERS SINCE CHILDHOOD, DURING UNIVERSITY SHE PUT HER STUDIES TO GOOD USE BY HELPING THE STREET LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

Volunteering. That is the one thing that describes Giulia Bono more than anything else. More than the fact that she is 22 years old, is in the first year of a Master degree in marketing (after a three-year Bachelor from Bocconi in business administration) or that she is passionate about dance. She has simply always been involved in volunteering. The last experience, during University, was participation in the project "Make sense of your profit" in the street lawyers association. Giulia told about all this (and much more) on the stage of Bocconi's Donor Event, together with two colleagues as they presented stories of merit that earned them scholarships. Giulia, in fact, benefits from one of the BAA Scholarship's partial tuition exemptions.

Giulia's academic career began in the province of Lecce, in Santa Cesarea: "My parents urged me to choose Bocconi, they saw it as an investment for the future", says the young woman. "I was able to enter the Bachelor program thanks to a partial exemption, and then the Master thanks to the BAA scholarship". The first year, she recalls, was not simple: "The transition from a small town, like the one I was used to, to a much bigger one like Milan and Bocconi put me to the test, definitely raised the bar. Bocconi offers you stimuli, learning methods and opportunities that make you understand that there is more to reality than the comfort zone you are used to".

With the transition to the University, however, Giulia Bono did not lose the habit of volunteering, which has accompanied her since she was small: "At home I volunteered with children and the elderly," she explains. "Here I continued at Pane Quotidiano on the occasion of the Bocconi community days and then with the project Make sense of your profit". For the latter, during her Master studies, she was assigned to a project that initially frightened her a little: "It was about collaborating with the street lawyers association, which provides free legal assistance to the homeless". Giulia faced a dilemma: what to do to be able to make a concrete contribution? "I reckoned that, as a marketing student, the best thing I could do to help was put to use what I studied. So together with others, I worked to promote the association among companies, creating a video presentation. I also contacted several prominent personalities who could become testimonials of the project. I was in charge of the part connected to communication, on social networks as well ".

Between Giulia's support of her neighbors and what she herself received, what emerges from the student's words is a sense of an enlarged community. Like that of Bocconi, "that takes care of its members and stimulates you so much that it brings out the best in you. Even when we ourselves do not realize how far we can go ".

Help, support, proximity, for Giulia represent a virtuous circle. "Volunteering, like the support given by a scholarship, have the same principle behind them: to push those who receive them to commit themselves to giving something back. When I think about this, the theme of the film "A dream for tomorrow" always comes to mind: what you do is create a chain whose final result is much greater than the sum of individual gestures ".
 
 
 

by Andrea Celauro
Translated by Richard Greenslade