Brescia · Lombardia · in development

Settling into a new country is work. It goes better in your own language.

Tamia4Life is being built as a mother-tongue orientation, mediation and training service for people of foreign origin living and working in Italy — and for the employers whose workforces depend on them. Non-clinical by design. Delivered by bilingual facilitators who have made the same journey.

We are not open yet. We are in the listening phase — and we are looking for people to talk to.

One service. Every member's own language.

  • English

    Welcome. Let's begin in your language.

  • Italiano

    Benvenuto. Iniziamo nella tua lingua.

  • Română

    Bine ai venit. Începem în limba ta.

  • العربية · Arabic

    أهلاً بك. لنبدأ بلغتك.

  • Shqip · Albanian

    Mirë se vjen. Le të fillojmë në gjuhën tënde.

  • ਪੰਜਾਬੀ · Punjabi

    ਜੀ ਆਇਆਂ ਨੂੰ। ਆਓ ਤੁਹਾਡੀ ਭਾਸ਼ਾ ਵਿੱਚ ਸ਼ੁਰੂ ਕਰੀਏ।

  • اردو · Urdu

    خوش آمدید۔ آئیے آپ کی زبان میں شروع کرتے ہیں۔

  • 中文 · Chinese

    欢迎。让我们用您的语言开始。

  • Українська · Ukrainian

    Ласкаво просимо. Почнімо вашою мовою.

  • বাংলা · Bengali

    স্বাগতম। চলুন আপনার ভাষায় শুরু করি।

  • Español

    Bienvenido. Empecemos en tu idioma.

  • Français

    Bienvenue. Commençons dans votre langue.

  • हिन्दी · Hindi

    स्वागत है। आइए आपकी भाषा में शुरू करें।

  • Filipino · Tagalog

    Maligayang pagdating. Magsimula tayo sa iyong wika.

Which languages we actually open with is a decision we are making with communities in Brescia — not for them.

The gap

Between "I'm fine" and "I need a doctor", there is almost nothing.

And what little exists is rarely offered in a language people think in.

More than five million residents of foreign origin live in Italy. They staff its logistics hubs, its care homes, its farms, its restaurants and its factories. In the province of Brescia the share is among the highest in the country.

What they do not have is somewhere ordinary to take the ordinary difficulty of building a life in a second language: paperwork nobody explains, a school system nobody translates, a workplace where you are competent but cannot say so, a family two thousand kilometres away. None of that is illness. All of it is heavy.

The options that exist sit at the extremes. General wellbeing apps are written for someone else's culture and someone else's week. Health services are reactive, oversubscribed, and — for people who have learned to be careful about who records their name — carry a cost that has nothing to do with money. In between, where most people actually are, there is a gap.

Tamia4Life is being designed for the gap. Orientation, cultural mediation, accompaniment and group learning, in the member's own language, delivered by people who have made the same crossing. Where something belongs with a health professional, we say so and we hand it over — properly, to a named person, not to a leaflet.

5M+residents of foreign origin in ItalyOrder of magnitude — to be re-cited from ISTAT at launch
3service lanes, kept separate by designSee "What we're building"
0records of immigration or legal statusNever collected. Enforced in the schema, not by policy

What we're building

Three lanes. A person is in exactly one at a time.

This separation is the architecture of the service, not a disclaimer at the bottom of a page. Italian law reserves certain acts to registered professionals. We would rather build around that line clearly than blur it and hope.

Lane A

Percorso clinico

Individual sessions for someone who is struggling. Reserved by law — delivered only by a psicologo iscritto all'Albo, under their own registration, never by a facilitator.

Not open — opens only with a registered professional in place

Delivered by
Registered psychologist
Format
1:1, continuing
Data
Health data — strictest handling

Lane B

Mediazione

Linguistic and cultural mediation. Understanding a letter from the Comune, preparing for a parents' evening, navigating a service, being accompanied to an appointment where the words matter.

In design

Delivered by
Bilingual mediators
Format
1:1 or family, task-based
Data
Ordinary personal data

Lane C

Formazione

Group work and training. Adaptation workshops, peer groups by language community, workplace communication, and training for the Italian managers and colleagues on the other side of that conversation.

In design

Delivered by
Trainers, facilitators
Format
Group, never individual
Data
Largely aggregate

Why we are strict about this

In Italy, acts such as diagnosi, colloquio clinico and sostegno psicologico are reserved to psychologists registered with the Ordine under Legge 56/1989. The Court of Cassation has held that presenting yourself as competent to address a person's inner difficulty — continuously, for a fee — can cross that line even where no diagnosis and no treatment ever took place.

So Lanes B and C do not offer a version of that with softer words. They offer something genuinely different: practical help with the outside world, and learning done together. When a facilitator meets something that belongs in Lane A, they have one action to escalate it, and using it costs them nothing.

For employers

You already own this obligation. Most people discharge it with a tick-box.

Brescia's logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, care and hospitality employers run multilingual floors. The gap on those floors is not motivation — it is language and adaptation.

Under art. 28 D.lgs 81/2008, every Italian employer with at least one worker must assess stress lavoro-correlato as part of the DVR. It applies regardless of company size or sector — only the method scales. INAIL's methodology runs in two phases, and where the preliminary phase returns a medium or high result, the deeper phase — questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus groups — has to actually be carried out by someone qualified to carry it out.

That second phase is where multilingual workforces are routinely underserved, because it is run in Italian, to workers who answer in Italian only as far as their Italian goes. An assessment your people cannot fully answer is not an assessment.

The boundary we will state to every buyer

Carrying out the assessment the law already requires is compliance. It is not, by itself, an INAIL OT23-creditable intervention, and we will never sell it as one. What is creditable is the qualified delivery of the deeper phase and the above-minimum interventions that follow it — and those we will describe precisely, with the intervention code the activity is intended to evidence, so your dossier survives contact with INAIL.

What an employer engagement is intended to look like
What you getWhat it is not
The deeper assessment phase run in the languages your workforce actually speaksA translated questionnaire and hope
Adaptation and workplace-communication workshops, by language communityIndividual sessions delivered by a facilitator
Training for Italian supervisors on managing across languagesCultural-sensitivity theatre with no follow-through
Anonymised, aggregate participation and outcome reporting for your fileAnything at all about a named employee
An honest referral when something belongs with a health professionalUs keeping hold of it because it is billable

Language & people

The network is the thing that is hard to copy.

Anyone can build the software. Assembling facilitators who hold both the language and the lived experience — and keeping them — is the work.

Matching is on language first, then shared cultural experience — never on a description of how someone feels. A member always sees why they were matched with a particular facilitator, in plain words, and can change that match without explaining themselves.

Facilitators are people who have made the crossing themselves: they know what it is to hold a professional qualification that does not travel, to read a school letter three times, to be the person the whole extended family calls when something official arrives. They are trained, they are paid properly, and their credentials — including Albo registration where the lane requires it — are verified and re-verified, not taken on trust.

The languages we open with will be decided by the discovery work now underway in Brescia, not chosen in advance from a spreadsheet. These are the communities the province suggests we start with:

العربية اردو ਪੰਜਾਬੀ हिन्दी Română Shqip 中文 বাংলা Français · Wolof Українська Español Filipino and whichever the interviews tell us we've missed

Your information

We are asking a cautious audience to trust us. So the promises are structural.

Every commitment below is enforced in how the system is built, so that keeping it does not depend on anyone remembering to.

  • We never record immigration or legal statusNot in a field, not in a note, not in a free-text box that invites it. There is nowhere in the system to put it, which is the only version of this promise worth making.
  • Your employer never sees youEmployers receive participation and outcome figures in aggregate. No names, no sessions, no individual anything — including the fact that you took part at all, where the group is small enough for that to identify you.
  • The lanes are separated in storage, not just on paperA Lane C trainer is technically incapable of reading a Lane A record. Access is a boundary in the system, not a rule in a handbook.
  • Data stays in the EU, and we ask for less of itEU-hosted infrastructure. Age, time in Italy and employment status recorded as broad bands, never exact values — because no report we owe anyone needs more than that.
  • Deletion means deletionA published retention period per lane, automatic expiry, and an erasure request that actually reaches backups and exports — designed so that removing you does not quietly break anything we have already reported.

Where we are

Honestly: at the beginning, and deliberately so.

We would rather be publicly early than quietly wrong. Everything below is where the venture actually stands today.

  1. 1

    ListeningWe are here

    Structured interviews with residents of foreign origin in and around Brescia, and with employers who run multilingual workforces. We are testing whether the difficulty we think exists is the difficulty people actually have — and whether an employer will name a cost and a budget owner for it.

    Running now · nothing else ships until this is done properly

  2. 2

    Designing the service around what we heard

    Triage rules, the three-lane separation, the consent flows and the evidence model — specified and reviewed, including a written legal opinion on the professional boundary and a data protection impact assessment before a single real record exists.

    Follows Phase 1 · not before

  3. 3

    Constituting the vehicle

    Registering as an Italian social enterprise, with a statute naming migrant integration, socio-health prevention and vocational training as its general-interest activities — which is what opens the public and European funding lines this work belongs in.

    In parallel with Phase 2

  4. 4

    A first cohort, with a psychologist in place

    A small pilot with one or two anchor employers and one or two language communities. Lane A opens at this point and not before, because it cannot exist without a registered professional attached to it.

    Subject to Phases 1–3 clearing

  5. 5

    Evidence, then scale

    Measured outcomes published in a social report, more language communities, more employers. We grow on evidence we recorded at the time the service was delivered — never on a number reconstructed afterwards to fit an application.

    Funding windows open March–April 2027

Take part

The most useful thing you can give us right now is forty minutes.

Not money, not a sign-up. A conversation. This is the phase where being told we are wrong is worth more than being told we are right.

If you live in Italy and Italian is not your first language

Tell us what settling in has actually cost you

A conversation, in your language, with someone who speaks it. About the practical difficulty of building a life here — the paperwork, the work, the family, the distance.

  • 30–40 minutes, in person in Brescia or online
  • In your language, with a bilingual interviewer
  • We never ask about your immigration or legal status
  • Nothing is recorded unless you say yes, and you can stop at any point
  • No sign-up, no cost, and nothing is being sold to you

If you employ a multilingual workforce

Tell us what it costs you when language gets in the way

Turnover in the first ninety days, instructions that have to be given twice, a stress assessment your workforce could not fully answer. We want the real number and the person whose budget it comes out of.

  • 30 minutes with whoever owns the problem — HR, HSE, or the plant
  • We will tell you plainly which parts of this are compliance and which are not
  • No proposal at the end of it, because there is nothing yet to propose
  • If a pilot makes sense later, you will already know exactly what you would be buying