Tobilì is located in Naples and proposes ethnic cooking as a means to promote cross-cultural dialogue. The cooperative carries out different activities: ethnic catering services and cookery workshops and lessons on Armenian, Turkish/Kurdish, Malian and Somali cooking. It also organizes cross-cultural exchange initiatives focused on different countries’ culinary art.
We asked them to tell us about their story.
Where does the idea come from?
The idea came up during a 6-month training course on entrepreneurship, organized in Naples in 2015 and open to both Italians and migrants. There, the future members of the cooperative met and shared their dream to open a restaurant, using cooking as a means to make people know more about their native countries. They love cooking and they would like to develop something so they can work and fit in to Italian society. To carry out their project they followed other training, particularly focusing on catering service management.
How is the team made up?
We are five members: Bouyagui Konatè, Levent Kanat, Susanna Poghosyan, Roberto Vitaloni and Daniela Fiore. Three of us are young migrants, asylum seekers or refugees, the fourth is an expert in the catering industry and the fifth is a social project manager. We share some common characteristics (young age, searching for a new life, having a certain amount of relevant training or working experience) but we are also very different from a cultural point of view and for our specific skills.
What is your medium/long term goal?
Focusing on continuous training and team building, we would like to be one of the first cooperatives in ethnic catering and become an example of matching entrepreneurship and cultural integration. Our main goals are strengthening social cohesion through cultural matching and overcoming prejudices and discrimination to build a real cross-cultural dialogue.
Why a cooperative?
We think that a cooperative is the best way to make our similarities stronger and our differences more compatible. In a cooperative, each member is not just a simple worker but can act as a manager and the cooperative can be a means to improve member responsibility, economic independence and social integration. Focusing on product quality and regular work, we would like to show that differences could be an actual source of cultural, economic and social wealth.