Courage Award 2025: Eugenia Carfora awarded for her fight against school dropout and legality

Since 1983, the National Association of Women Voters of Brescia has organized the Courage Award, assigned to female personalities who have distinguished themselves in the political, social and cultural fields in promoting the courage of ethical-civil living. The award, of national importance, named after Gianna Spada, in 2025 it will be awarded to Professor Eugenia Carfora – Dean of the Francesco Morano High School in Caivano (Na) – for her personal battle against school dropout and for having made her School an example of legality and a positive model for all of Italy. During the ceremony, Dr. Francesco Verderami, Editorialist of Corriere della Sera, will converse with the award winner.

Eugenia Carfora has been on the front line for 18 years as a school principal in a frontier school, in a difficult neighborhood where degradation reigns, the mafia rules and drug dealing squares regulate life in the buildings and families. She has tried in every way to recover the kids from the streets convinced that, “every extra minute spent at school is a minute taken away from bad examples and blackmail by criminals”.

She was called “Courageous Principal” because she was the first to choose not to accept that the students did not show up at school. She herself went out to look for them in the urban agglomeration of impersonal barracks built quickly after the 1980 earthquake. The Green Park, whose name contradicts a reality that knows neither trees nor grass, is an abandoned area. As in the forgotten suburbs, only crime grows and drug dealing flourishes. This is the same neighborhood where in 2014 little Fortuna Loffredo, just 6 years old, was raped by a neighbor and thrown off the terrace of her building.

Caivano is a town that also suffers from the tragedy of toxic waste. This is the unhealthy and deteriorated reality that surrounds the Morano Institute. Headmistress Eugenia Carfora never resigned herself to the idea that Caivano could be a place without hope. For this reason, she conveyed to her students the idea that school is the only viable way to fight illegality, have a real job and not become delinquent laborers. When she arrived in 2007, the school was almost unusable. In some classrooms and corridors there wasn't even a floor. The toilets were unworthy of being called such and the courtyard was cluttered with garbage. Half of one floor had been occupied by the caretaker's family and inside the Institute there was an illegal bar.

Today the courtyard has been cleaned, the classrooms repainted and approximately 900 children regularly attend classes. The blackboards have been replaced by computers and projectors, and you can also learn to act and make music. But Eugenia Carfora's flagship is the Hotel Management Institute, created from scratch using recycled furniture donated by people who fell in love with her project and her tenacious spirit of initiative. His appeal for legality was welcomed by the institutions and recently also by RAI which, having considered his story significant, is producing a television series.

The dream of the Principal of Caivano it doesn't end with the redevelopment of the school and helping young people find work far from the place where they grew up. His dream is another, based on a wealth of energy, ideas and good will that can connect young people to the territory. It is necessary that courage becomes contagious and pushes other people to invest in local potential, cultivating the available spaces to create a food supply chain. The project would make the Morano Institute a unique case in Italy, you just have to believe in it and have the courage to try.

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