By Maria Jose Murcia
A purpose-driven alliance
BeDoCare was born as a platform to strengthen social sector organizations — accompanying them in their professionalization and in generating sustainable impact. But this mission requires something more: people formed with a different way of seeing work, society, and their own vocation.
That is why UNIV — a space for formation, dialogue, and international encounter among university students in Rome — became privileged ground for planting that perspective in the next generation.
Launching the youth arm
BeDoCare’s participation in UNIV 2026 marks an important step: the development of its youth focus. This new axis seeks to:
- Bring young university students closer to the world of social organizations
- Help them discover work as a space for real impact
- Form professionals with social sensitivity and the capacity for dialogue
This is not about “adding volunteering” — it is something more demanding: integrating professional vocation and social responsibility from the very beginning of the journey.
From margins to markets
As a concrete expression of this approach, BeDoCare led the seminar “From Margins to Markets: Work as a Bridge, Dialogue as a Path.” The proposal started from a simple but profound intuition: work can be a genuine form of dialogue — not abstract, but a concrete encounter between excluded young people and real opportunities, between unrecognized talent and markets that have not yet learned to see it.
“Dialogue does not happen only in words — it happens when people can participate, contribute, and be recognized in social and economic life.”
A real case: Arbusta
To ground these ideas, we worked through the case of Arbusta — a social enterprise that integrates young people from vulnerable contexts into the technology sector. Their model breaks a deeply entrenched logic: it does not wait for young people to be “market-ready,” but instead forms them through work itself.
Arbusta principle: “People learn by working and work while they learn.” In this way, Arbusta does not only generate employment — it creates a space where professional excellence and human development go hand in hand.
Beyond the case: changing the lens
We invited young people to reflect on what we actually mean by “margins.” Far from being a fixed category, margins emerged as something relational: they depend on how we look, how we organize our institutions, and what we consider valuable.
Arbusta’s founders began with a shift in perspective: they stopped seeing “young people without experience” and started recognizing unseen talent. That shift allowed them to identify opportunities where others saw limits, and to design a model capable of connecting two worlds that normally do not speak to each other.
At BeDoCare, we do not believe the answer is to “choose a career with purpose.” We insist on something more demanding — and more liberating — than that:
Learn to redirect your gaze within whatever you are already building.
Arbusta was not born because its founders left the business world to “do good.” It was born because they learned to see what others could not see within that same world: invisible talent, capability without a channel, silenced people who had a great deal to contribute.
When you are designing a solution, ask yourself who it leaves out — and how you can be more inclusive. When you are building a scalable business, ask yourself what social problem its very model could solve. When you are choosing where to direct your efforts, ask yourself not only what works, but for whom it works and for whom it still does not.
This is not about sacrificing professional excellence in the name of impact. It is about discovering that the deepest kind of excellence already includes that question.
That is the challenge. And also the opportunity.