Experience was set up in Bari on 28 April 2015. The cooperative’s main objective lies in offering an innovative service to improve the rental housing market in Puglia. It aims at increasing the quality of living in rented flats through innovative furnishing where the users are involved; it also promotes a tenant-user community. Target customers are students, researchers and young professionals needing short-term rental accommodation.
We asked them to tell us about their story.
Where does the idea come from?
Our project is an evolution of “Erasmus Student Experience”, an experimental project we launched in 2010 and winner of the Puglia Region call “Principi Attivi”. Having observed that the rental housing market for students has many negative sides such as slowness, irregularities and bad flat conditions, we thought that a service of housing management could improve the quality of rental life. Experience will manage some flats located in convenient areas organizing collaborative workshops with students and experts to enhance the apartment quality using ecofriendly materials and methods, where possible.
How is the team made up?
We are Giuseppe, Danilo and Francesco. We met at university where we participated in a student association and created our first community.
Giuseppe is the spokesperson and is specialized in training and group dynamics. Danilo is our marketing expert. Francesco is our business planner. We work together for the Erasmus Student Experience project.
What is your medium/long term goal?
We want to think about new ways of “living”, containing costs and sharing some services. As young people, we want to contribute to societal development through the shared housing experience. We would like to create a community of users to spread good practices for a sustainable lifestyle based on gamification principles.
Why a cooperative?
Our background has automatically led us to a cooperative. We think it is the ideal way to get others involved – new members, new skills, new responses to old needs– sharing ideas to achieve the tangible, that is a decent place to live. We believe cooperation is job creation.