Roberta Tomasi

After years of working in my own profit-focused company, I decided to change course and channel my skills and experience into the non-profit sector.
The company I run was mainly linked to the legal sector and I used to be the team manager and representative at the Public Prosecutor’s office of Milan during investigations, mainly at the Anti-Mafia Department.

During this long experience I acquired organizational skills, the ability to meet deadlines and manage stressful and ‘delicate’ contexts, the capacity to deal with work peaks and qualities of confidentiality, reliability and seriousness.
I chose to completely change sector after many years because I felt the strong need to make my skills and energies available in a complex but highly valuable profession, to give my contribution to the fight against injustice and poverty, to the defence of human rights.

I have been a volunteer since I was young and helped in various ways some small organisations, but my desire was to become a professional.

Years of study and specialization marked the beginning of my new career, worth mentioning are certainly the diploma in Humanitarian Emergencies, that laid my foundations in the sector; the professional certification in Migration & Hospitality, a topic I am very sensitive to and on which I am specializing given the Italian emergency; and the Master degree in Project Management with the Social Change School. This provided me with all the tools related to the formulation, implementation and monitoring of projects according to the Project Cycle Management, as well as knowledge of the procedures required by the various donors.

In the last few years, I flew to different countries to gain field experience, I have been to Cambodia and Africa, more precisely in Uganda and Benin.
In Africa I carried out, independently and in a team, interdisciplinary tasks: study of ongoing projects and monitoring them, fundraising, drafting new project proposals, Logical Framework, participation in events, review of reports, field activities, impact study of existing projects, budget development, planning meetings.
I have been there first whit a small local organization, RWO (Resilient Women’s Organization), whose main mission is the women’s empowerment, whose objectives are to break the cycle of illiteracy and poverty in their lives, families and communities; then with a bigger one, WeWorld-GVC, whose primary mission is to help the weakest, especially children, by supporting their education and their rights.
It was really interesting and formative to follow two such different realities.
The conception of my first project dates back to 2019 with ‘Il Nodo Cooperazione Internazionale’ – a small non-profit organization based in Italy and Cambodia, whose vision is a better future for Cambodian girls/boys through education and professional training – when, still lacking specific studies, ‘Wood for change’ was born, a project that aimed to train young Cambodians towards new forms of craftsmanship based on the reuse of wood and abandoned materials.

I’m now based in Italy, Milan, and I started working as a Master Didactic Coordinator and Head of Didactics at the Social Change School to hand over my knowledge and experience to new future colleagues.

Learn more about Roberta by reading her interview on our blog!