The Foundation and MMN for the common project “In memory of Carlo”

“In memory of Carlo”. Slightly more than a year after the beatification of the young former student Carlo Acutis, the Jesuit Education Foundation and Magnetic Media Network (MMN) are launching an educational support project within the Ignatian training circuit.

The selections for a five-year scholarship will start in March this year thus completing the cycle of studies which began in the Jesuit Schools and with the aim of guaranteeing continuity in the training of a worthy student with special needs who wishes to proceed in his secondary school career.

MMN, which develops technological and digital innovation projects in the Business, Healthcare, and Education areas, firmly believes in technology as an asset facilitator to cope with the major issues and challenges our society is currently facing. This means relying on a form of technology designed for people, with digital literacy and conscious inclusiveness at its core. For over thirty years, MMN has been committed to implementing IT plans that take shape in the context of educational places and come to life in the workplace through highly innovative and eco-friendly projects.

In order to achieve this, MMN has decided to allocate energies to support an educational structure which has always been focused on the training of a person as a whole, responding to nowadays society’s challenges, constructively and consciously exploiting the chances that the digital world offers new generations. This Jesuit Schools experience has made technology and digitization fundamental assets of its educational method and is consistent with the vision of MMN, which has contributed to bringing a new way of teaching over the years, by making it more interactive and engaging, in the best Italian schools and educational institutions.

«Building training opportunities, improving skills and new human assets are essential goals in our view. – says Damiano Airoldi, CEO of MMN – The provision of bursaries for higher education and university is something we have consolidated in recent years and to pursue which we are actively collaborating with the Jesuit Education Foundation.

Allocating these bursaries and taking young people on in their growth path is an important commitment, we strongly believe in: it is our concrete response to the emergency in education that the youngest are now  experiencing, especially after two years of discontinuous education and  among growing economic issues in their families’ environments. In current times, educational centers and institutions are increasingly made to paying close attention to the importance of training students through digitized tools and IT skills – a target which MMN has been constantly pursuing since its  very foundation “.

The Jesuit Education Foundation has always supported the demand for a high-level and valuable culture, as explained by Guido Bigotto, director general of the Foundation: “The changes in the Italian socio-economic and demographic context increasingly lead families to search for Institutes that not only do provide consistent and thorough educational paths, but do also pay close attention to the uniqueness of an individual, as well as to socializing and training journeys which may help our young people deal with the challenges of an increasingly complex world “.

The Ignatian Institute Leone XIII is actually where Carlo Acutis studied, he was the first Blessed who lived in the digital age and he is a major candidate to becoming the patron of the Internet, and furthermore he was passionate about technology and knew how to live his existence in all its positivity, with an open-minded attitude to life and relationships. This initiative had to be named after him. “We are honored for this wonderful initiative to set up scholarships destined to technological excellence in memory of our son Carlo. It seems to us that it responds to what Carlo would have liked to do if he had remained on this planet: helping to shed a light on those talents as well as to let them bloom, talents that many young people do not easily have the opportunity to nurture”. As Carlo’s parents, Andrea and Antonia Acutis, claim.

Cardinal Vallini also recalled this in his sermon during the official beatification Mass: “Carlo felt a strong need to help people discover that God is close to us […] To communicate this spiritual need he used every means, including the modern means of social communication, which he deeply knew how to use, especially the Internet, which he considered a real gift from our Lord ».

Visit the website: https://www.inmemoriadicarlo.org