United Nations (UN) countries have adopted a set of goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all: in few words, to create sustainable communities. A sustainable community manages its human, natural, and financial capital to meet current needs while ensuring that adequate resources are available for future generations.
The idea promoted by the symposium is that sustainable communities are places in which people engage in community actions aimed at building and creating inclusive cultures and wellbeing.
The symposium will answer the following questions: How do we promote sustainable communities favouring knowledge and involvement through community actions? How can we partner community organizations in order to create a model of community wellbeing driven by the community itself?

The first talk of the symposium by Fortuna Procentese and Immacolata Di Napoli (University of Naples - Italy) will recommend that sustainable futures can be built by promoting social responsibility, sense of community and participation. Authors will highlight that experiencing social responsibility, community trust, and hope, people can act in order to increase personal and community well-being. They will introduce and discuss what induces and predicts civic engagement, considering as variables the role of Sense of Responsible Togetherness (SoRT), Community Trust, and Hope. The expected results will give some guidance to urban planners and local governments, when promoting urban development, social empowerment, and community well-being.

How different individuals and organizations take different roles, and work together, to tackle sustainability challenges?

The second talk by Arthur Stukas (La Trobe University – Australia; with co-authors Katja Petrovic and Mathew Marques) will focus on volunteerism as an example of social participation.
Research that takes a functional approach to understanding volunteerism suggests that different people volunteer for different reasons (or for more than one reason). Moreover, to the extent that they find that their volunteer activities fulfil (or match) their initial motivations, volunteers are predicted to be more satisfied and intend to continue volunteering. Stukas will present the results of a meta-analysis on approximately 3500 volunteers. Recent work has found that volunteers motivated by a focus on others rather than on themselves report more positive outcomes from volunteering alongside higher well-being. Authors will test whether matching effects on satisfaction and intentions are stronger for volunteers with other-focused motivations as compared to self-focused motivations. The implications for building and sustaining communities through voluntary prosocial action will be discussed.

The third talk by Maura Pozzi, Elena Marta, and Carlo Pistoni (Catholic University of Milan - Italy) will focus on political engagement and in particular on how to promote political participation. Political stability can be an element of a sustainable community and political participation is a key element for an equal opportunity for all individuals to participate in and influence decisions that affect each of their lives. Authors will present a model of the intention to vote that combines self-determination theory variables within a participation psychology model. The study will highlight the importance of political identification, group efficacy and motivation in a national representative group of 2130 young adult Italian participants.