“The Social Challenge” is a charitable initiative that was first organized in 2015 by SEA (Società Esercizi Aeroportuali). SEA is a company controlled by Milan’s Municipality, and it manages Milan’s two airports, Linate and Malpensa.

The initiative’s main objective is to annually award funds to 6 projects of no profit organizations from the provinces of Milan and Varese (3 projects are chosen per province). The projects enter the competition mainly through SEA’s employees’ proposals: employees pick projects, bring them to the attention of their colleagues, and become the “sponsors” of these projects within the company. While this is the company’s preferred option for the introduction of projects to the competition, sometimes externally proposed projects can be considered as well. Once the complete list of all accepted projects is finalized, a panel, composed of high-ranking SEA employees and of no-profit sector’s experts, picks 12 finalists per province. The winners, amongst these finalists, are chosen by SEA employees through a voting process. Here, the “sponsors”’ role is key, as they have to work to convince their colleagues that the project they proposed is worthy of being awarded the funds at stake. 

Through a SEA employee, Cieli Azzurri entered the “High Care Area” project into the competition’s first edition. This project aims to build a sub-intensive pediatric surgery area within Milan’s Policlinic Hospital; you can read more about it in the article “The High Care Area Project”. Our project, as well as several others, could not come out of the first edition’s final voting stage. However, given the incredibly high quality of all the projects involved, the initiative’s jury decided to have an internal referendum about all of them, to decide which ones to re-consider in the following edition’s final stage. Our project was amongst the winners of this referendum, and as such it was again up for voting in the second edition of The Social Challenge. 

In this second edition, our project was among the 3 winners in Milan’s province. As such, Cieli Azzurri was grateful to accept a 10.000 euros cheque, just like the other 5 winning projects. Our intention is to use these funds to purchase all of the equipment required for the aforementioned area’s correct functioning.  It was an immense honor to be considered worthy of this award, especially considering the incredibly high quality of all the other projects involved in the competition. We will now strive to be able to show, in a year’s time, concrete and convincing results to all those employees who chose to support our project.