This year it will be Don Gaetano Galia, chaplain of the Bancali prison, who will receive the "Special Golden Candlestick". «He has carried out - this is the motivation of the commission chaired by the mayor Giuseppe Mascia - a valuable job for our city, becoming an essential point of reference for individuals, groups, associations and local institutions. Looking at his life against the light, one can see the sum of many lives: those of the many people from Sassari and beyond to whom he extended a hand, helping them to get up from a condition of discomfort towards a full and independent life. Among them many prisoners and ex-prisoners."
Don Galia, 64 years old, educational psychologist, Salesian and originally from Arborea, has worked in Sassari for many years where he is also the contact person for penitentiary pastoral care in Sardinia.
Since the 90s, in the Latte Dolce neighbourhood, he has been active in helping those who risked ending up on the margins , and in 1998 he was one of the founders of a residential reception project for minors in situations of marginality, deviance or at risk. of social exclusion. The initiative has today transformed into the social cooperative "Il Sogno", which coexists with the "Difenze" cooperative, involved in the employment of disadvantaged people, the Cospes, the Salesian vocational and social scholastic orientation centre, and the Community of “Don Graziano Muntoni” reception, which takes care of prisoners as an alternative to detention.
A mission that the priest carries out by adhering to the thought that "the true educator is the one who works to provide transversal skills of autonomy". «I am happy - comments Don Gaetano - I believe that this choice aims to enhance a basic idea, that is, how necessary and priority it is to pay our attention towards the least and the needy».
