When the celebrated war photographer Robert Capa died in 1954, his brother Cornell was inspired to set up a fund in order to preserve the heritage of the art of photo-reportage. A first establishment opened 12 years later. It housed works by Robert Capa, but also by other photographers such as Werner Bischof and David Seymour. Then in 1974 the International Center for Photography was created in New York. Part museum, part school, part research centre, it has become one of the most impressive establishments in the world dedicated to photography. Situated on a 2,500 square metre campus in midtown Manhattan, the centre takes in 5,000 students every year and offers some 400 courses ranging from practical training (darkroom printing for example) to theory and workshops with professionals. Students who complete their studies qualify for a master’s degree. The museum part of the centre today contains a stock of some 100,000 photographs.

On Thursday 26 May 2011, nine days after the rencontre nationale Sortir de l’illettrisme au centre Georges-Pompidou (national meeting on combating illiteracy, at the Georges-Pompidou centre) bringing together public, private, institutional and nonprofit players engaged in the combat against illiteracy, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy would like to continue these exchanges with the spouses of Heads of State and Government present at the G8. For while three million people in France suffer from illiteracy, the problem affects over 80 million people in Europe, or 30% of the active population. For this working session, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has invited two experts: on the French side, Marie-Thérèse Geffroy, director of ANCLI (national agency for the combat against illiteracy), and, representing UNESCO, Adama Ouane, the director of UIL (institute for lifelong learning). The following day, she will be hosting a working lunch on the theme of protecting mothers and children against the AIDS virus. In the presence of Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to combat AIDS, and Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS, this working lunch aims to take stock of initiatives already conducted in the field and reaffirm the need for all partners to work together to eradicate the pandemic. Its primary purpose is to raise the awareness of spouses of the Heads of State and Government present at the G8 Summit of the possibility of eradicating mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus by 2015 (goals 4, 5 and 6 of the Millennium Development Goals: reduction of infant mortality, improvement of maternal health, the combat against AIDS, malaria and infectious diseases). These efforts build on the work done in the United Nations General Assembly on AIDS, which took place at the UN in New York from 8 to 10 June 2011, when a common plan – Countdown to Zero – was drawn up with the aim of preserving the lives of mothers and eliminating new HIV/AIDS infection among children looking to 2015.

The Music For All programme is one of a raft of Foundation initiatives designed to promote access to skills and knowledge for as many people as possible. Established in partnership with the Radio Classique music station, it aims to bring classical music to vulnerable people in areas where access to culture is difficult. In September 2010, in partnership with the association L’Enfant@l’hôpital, a first concert with pianist Brigitte Engerer was held at the Saint-Louis chapel at the La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital complex. In the following month, in October 2010, two concerts were performed by Jean-Claude Casadesus, at the Lille-Séquedin prison, first for a male then for a female audience. On 15 May 2011, the Modigliani quartet played a concert at the Lasserre retirement home (Issy-les-Moulineaux) All the concerts, presented by Olivier Bellamy, were later rebroadcast on Radio Classique.

In 2012, as part of its educational support programmes for students from low-income backgrounds or living in remote or disadvantaged areas, the Foundation is commissioning 12 educational films focusing on arts and crafts careers that are often little understood by the general public, such as masonry, carpentry, glass blowing, weaving etc. All are repositories of French excellence and expertise, with significant international impact. The films address the public in two different ways: they are available online supported by a range of factsheets, enabling viewers to learn more about the resources and training necessary to get started, and also in DVD form, accompanied by guidance booklet. For the latter, the Foundation has established a partnership with Onisep, the French national information bureau for teaching and the professions and the INMA, the national arts and crafts institute, so that the materials may be distributed to the 24 secondary schools partnering the ‘My career in the arts’ programme and the Foundation’s partner organisations.

Opened in 2004, L’Alchimie des jours is a family boarding house created by Samusocial of Paris for the homeless. Labelled a “bridging house”, it comprises twenty-three small flats for single people and five studios for couples in situations of extreme exclusion. Occupants of these homes then become eligible for a government individual housing allowance. Whether a temporary or permanent abode (there are no limitations of length of stay), L’Alchimie des Jours is not just a boarding house or place of accommodation, but a home. By encouraging its residents to live independently, through the provision of communal areas (dining room, kitchen, TV room), the project helps the excluded rehabilitate and rebuild their lives. As part of its programme for the seriously excluded, the Foundation has teamed up with Samusocial Paris. It supports psychological and artistic outreach activities (trips into the heart of the countryside, socio-cultural projects, etc.) and counselling in five accommodation, rest and health care centres located in Ile-de-France and in the L’Alchimie des Jours boarding house.

Designed by architect Christian de Porzamparc, the Cité de la musique is part of an extensive renovation project initiated by François Mitterrand and inaugurated in 1995 in the district of La Villette in Paris. Located next to to the National Conservatory of Music and Dance, it includes a museum, concert hall, areas for workshops and a documentation centre (including a media library), and exhibition areas dedicated to all types of music – jazz, rock and French songs as well as classical music (such exhibitions are frequently accompanied by illuminating lectures on the work of the artists being showcased). The Cité de la musique also plays host to contemporary ensembles in residence.
In 2010, in a learning programme designed to open up classical music to audiences from diverse backgrounds, the centre ran an educational project, À toi de jouer, in conjunction with the Foundation. Designed for children from disadvantaged districts of the city of Aix-en-Provence, the project involved youngsters aged 7 to 12, who, for various economic and social reasons, had not previously had access to artistic expression. À toi de jouer helps them discover the world of music through an innovative educational approach, based on the intuitive practice of instruments, while playing together in a small orchestra.

On April 6, 2009, an earthquake struck the city of Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, Italy, leaving 308 dead and 73,000 homeless. Three months later, while a G8 summit was held in the region, 24,000 people were still living in tents. On Friday, July 10, 2009, alongside the official trips organised for spouses of heads of state, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy made a field visit to the scene of the disaster. The visit, starting from the Piazza Duomo, took in the city, many destroyed buildings (Santa Maria del Suffrage and Piazza San Marco) and the renovated part of the San Salvatore hospital (external structures managed by the Civil Protection Service and a new operating room). The tour was followed by a meeting with the services of the Italian Civil Protection and NGOs active in the rescue operations and a presentation of emergecny support methods (evacuation, medical care and surgical and psychological support). Following the visit, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy made a personal donation of €50,000 to the hospital for the purchase of an incubator for the most vulnerable new babies. The incubator was opened in 2010 in the paediatric ward of the San Salvatore Hospital.

In 1981, Olivier Bellamy, born thirty years earlier in Marseille, had the idea of sharing his passion for classical music with as many people as possible.  These were the early days of free radio.  He offered his services to Radio Oxygen in the city of Angers. For Bellamy, it was the starting point of a long career as a presenter and journalist in print, on air, producing TV portraits, as head of Radio Classique Festival and as artistic director of the classical music festival in Ramatuelle.

As a child, his mother made him take music lessons because she herself hadn’t had the chance, having been born into a family of ten children in Morocco. His father played by ear on the old Pleyel piano in the house, but died too young, “So maybe music became a refuge. My mother listened to a lot of French music: Barbara, Brassens, Ferré.  And she loved Bach’s cantatas...”

In his daily Passion Classique show on Radio Classique, Bellamy tries to unexplored similarly formative emotions in his guests – prominent public figures from the arts and entertainment worlds, scientists and politicians. For this admirer of Alfred Cortot and La Callas is certain of one thing: “All stories are made up of accidents, accidents that can turn out happily, even in difficult times.  And music helps you to transcend, to overcome pain that seems unbearable.  When this happens in childhood or adolescence the impact is even greater.  With this programme, I wanted to show that classical music is not something intellectualised and inaccessible, but that it always starts with an emotion, an encounter, which then drives the need for transcendence. And perhaps because it is an abstraction, without text or image, it goes further, deeper..”

In 2010, Olivier Bellamy teamed up with the Foundation’s programme Musique pour tous, which endeavours to bring classical music to isolated or remote audiences.

Michèle Barzach was once treated by a doctor when she was 12. “There were many poor people in Casablanca. I asked him why he treated these people. After he had gone I didn’t think ‘I want to be a doctor’, I thought, ‘I want to be like him.’” Born in Morocco, the daughter of an engineer of Russian extraction with artistic leanings, went on to be a gynaecologist and psychoanalyst before becoming Health Minister. “I travelled widely before I really understood what made me tick. The same stories kept coming up. I am drawn to women, kids, teenagers, not necessarily on the same continent but in almost identical situations. Stories which lead you back to the same realities: people who are discriminated against and rendered vulnerable. My life’s battle has been to fight to restore basic rights to those who have lost them.” In 1987, while serving as the only female minister in the Chirac cabinet, Michèle Barzach passed a decree allowing the distribution of syringes as part of a risk reduction policy designed to stem the transmission of HIV and HCV among intravenous drug users. She was also the politician who fought alongside Simone Veil (her role model) for a law enshrining women’s equality. She then mounted programmes with Médecins du monde, travelling to see the reality in developing countries decimated by AIDS and malaria for herself. Today, in addition to the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation, where she sits on the executive committee, she is a health strategy consultant, chairs the GlaxoSmithKline foundation working against AIDS and set up the European Friends of the Global Fund against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

In March 2010, the brand Roger Vivier created a bag dedicated to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: Miss Viv’. The funds this raised are being used to support over 1,000 children aged 18 months to 4 years in seven French Red Cross nurseries in the eastern region of France (Nancy, Forbach, Morhange, Faulquemont, and Bouzonville Tremery). Shows by the puppet company La Poudre de sourire and sensory awareness workshops (working on taste, smell, touch …) are run with a pack created specifically for the programme: the goal being to help break the cycle of precariousness and exclusion for children of vulnerable parents, encouraging their development through artistic awakening by means of a quality educational programme.

In January 2010, accompanied by the Red Cross and Samusocial at Charles de Gaulle airport, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy greeted the first refugees from the earthquake in Haiti: children aged between 1 and 6. The French Red Cross is very active in the field of childhood. It operates 93 schools in the areas of child and family protection, early childhood and child protection: support for children of imprisoned mothers; partnerships with hostels and rehabilitation centres and support for families, making use of dedicated reception centres, as well as a range of preventative initiatives.