From his designs for the Velib’ bike stations in Paris to the Plaza Athénée, Patrick Jouin has quietly but surely acquired a name as one of the most talented designers of his generation. Brought up in a village in the Nantes region, Jouin, a craftsman’s son who was already turning his hand to graffiti artist at the age of 15, long thought he would never make it to the “inner circle”. And yet finally, after learning to draw and various ways of shaping material, coupled with reading, listening to the radio and visiting museums, he went on to study at Paris’s National School of Industrial Design and ultimately collaborated with Philippe Starck. Patrick Jouin went on to be asked to redecorate the Van Cleef & Arpels boutique on the Place Vendôme, invent the cooking utensils of the future with chef Alain Ducasse and work with sleep experts on a device to help those having trouble sleeping. As part of the Revelations Lancôme programme, besides working on an organic restaurant project for Galeries Lafayette, a Villa Medici for the Swatch Group in Shanghai and the new signage for Paris taxis, Patrick Jouin met in March 2010 with art college hopefuls from the Edouard Branly vocational school in Dreux. The meeting took place as part of a guided visit to the exhibition dedicated to Jouin at the Centre Georges Pompidou in May 2010.

The EnVol association was founded in 1990 in Segré, in Maine-et-Loire, a department in west-central France. It has spent the past 20 years struggling against illiteracy. Its 54 pro-bono teachers provide more than 20,000 hours of lessons a year for disadvantaged groups in five cantons. Most of their 528 students are looking for jobs. In line with its core agenda, i.e. cementing the key skills (reading, writing and calculating), EnVol also works with business firms that have signed an agreement with ANLCI, France’s anti-illiteracy agency. It has concurrently organised a variety of edu-taining projects to coach learners to read, and to introduce them to culture and their environment: the Fêtes de la Lecture (which it organises with the media library in Segré every May), the Nature outings (on hiking trails in and around Segré to explore the local wildlife, old buildings and history), the Fête des Sciences and Mot-nambules, a book-related project. This association has moreover just set up a new project, Lecture plaisir pour des adultes en difficulté avec les savoir de base (fun reading for adults in difficulty, covering the basic skills). Its weekly theatrical writing and reading workshops provide a creative environment to nurture essential reading and writing proficiency.

EnVol

ANLCI

In 1986, when computers were emerging on the horizon, urban planner Anne Dunoyer decided to start an association to provide the best that new technology had to offer for the people who needed it most, i.e. ill children and teenagers That was how L’Enfant à l’Hôpital was created. This association steps in when hospitals ask it to. It is working with about 50 wards in 35 institutions today. Ill children on long stints in hospitals often come from families that cannot afford to provide the care they need and compound several disadvantages to the point of verging on exclusion. This association started out half way through the 1980s but it really took off when the Internet became big. In 1998, L’Enfant@l’Hôpital became a platform, a small-scale living university so to speak, where scientists, explorers, etymologists and architects could share their experiences with children and teenagers isolated in hospitals, medical rehabilitation centres and classes for disabled children. Kanari was its first platform. Then it set up Kolibri, a new tool. Then it added Radio Kolibri, a podcast source. They are all advertising-free private forums for friendly exchanges that bring culture to children in hospitals. In 2008, L’Enfant@l’Hôpital was one of the first three associations that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy chose to help with the royalties from Comme si de rien n’était, one of her albums. Proceeds from the 14^th Sapins de Noël des Créateurs sale went to this association in December 2009. Less than a year later, this association teamed up to organise the concert by Brigitte Engerer that this Foundation and Radio Classique organised for the forgotten, in Saint-Louis chapel in Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital.

L’Enfant@l’hopital

L’Enfant@l’hopital (Facebook)

L’Enfant@l’hopital (Dailymotion)

Radio Classique

Brigitte Engerer

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy sported her Miss Viv’ handbag – which Bruno Frisoni designed for the Roger Vivier brand, and especially for France’s First Lady – at the Bastille Day ceremonies on 14 July 2009. It was part of that brand’s Autumn-Winter 2009-2010 haute-couture collection. A ready-to-wear version, featuring the fine handles and supple crocodile skin, went on sale in March 2010. This itbag, with the soft frame and hallmark ring buckle, from the man who has dressed Queen Elizabeth’s and The Beatles’ feet, was designed closely alongside the First Lady, who insisted on donating a portion of Miss Viv’ bag sale proceeds to a French Red Cross programme for young children.

Roger Vivier

The Red Cross

Bruno Frisoni

Queen Elisabeth

Beatles

After working on an artistic and cultural project with a primary school class, plastic artist Dominique Ghesquière got another call from a L’Onde, a contemporary art centre in Villacoublay (in Yvelines, near Paris) asking  her to run a 30-hour workshop in Versailles prison for women. The Foundation financed this workshop. Dominique Ghesquière asked each of the inmates to draw up a list of the things they missed the most. The goal was to turn an origami workshop into a way of re-conquering their own space. The opportunity to elicit self-expression provided a possible pointer: origami, as it were, casts a different, more intimate light: unfolding is about opening up, it unveils things that words are not always enough to encapsulate about a person, who can release something beyond the immediate, constrained and confined first impression we get from the surroundings. That was when a whole new world, with a story, an environment and an experience, a story that was stifled, ignored and suppressed in a prison environment, came to light.

Dominique Ghesquiere

Since Dr Xavier Emmanuelli founded the SamuSocial in 1993, it has been actively involved in efforts to counter social exclusion, which include touring the streets to reach out to the homeless people there. It does that in several ways: day-time and night-time rounds, an emergency number (115, more than 1.5 million calls in 2006), its 170 LHSS (medical and paramedical healthcare) beds and 223 emergency-relief lodging beds. Every day, the Paris SamuSocial also houses about 7,000 homeless people with families (half of whom are children) in the 114 Parisian hotels it has audited. The Paris SamuSocial also runs an exclusion watchdog, and has grown into a national and international federation (with arms in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Senegal, Peru, etc.). Its healthcare beds are available for people to rest for more than a 24-hour break, but the SamuSocial has also set up homes such as its Maison des Femmes in Montrouge, where homeless women can stop to start thinking about their future for renewable six-month spells.

Samusocial

Xavier Emmanuelli

The ANLCI was established in October 2000. It stems from the fact that 3,100,000 people, i.e. 9% of the French population aged 18 to 65, have been to school in this country but are illiterate today. This public agency gathers statistics about a problem that leads to social taboos, guides grassroots associations lacking the big-picture perspective, and raises public-sector and private-sector decision-maker awareness of the need to broach this issue. In 2003, this agency run by Marie-Thérèse Geffroy adopted a structuring framework: the “national frame of reference”, which it now uses to “measure” (and thereby promote local and national efforts concurring to gauge, prevent and curb illiteracy, and promote access to reading, writing and other basic skills for all), “organise” (harness and funnel resources from central government, local communities, business firms and the rest of society to fight against illiteracy) and provide “tools” (coach and support stakeholders taking action to eradicate illiteracy by developing their skills and professional approach). The ANLCI has also been organising an annual Forum in Lyons for roughly 3,000 participants since 2004. It was the ANLCI’s expert knowledge that enabled this Foundation to get a series of tailored projects off the ground via its France-wide RFP in February 2010, involving hands-on work with parents and children, broaching this issue from social as well as educational and family-related angles.

ANLCI

Marie-Thérèse Geffroy

The Albatros association was born in 1990 to foster integration by organising cultural exchanges and twinning agreements with African countries. “It all started with a handful of kids in Château-Arnoux/Saint-Auban, a village in Alpes-Haute Provence, in France. They wanted to help other people, and get in touch with the world outside,” explain Omar Chilla and Marguerite Salvy, from the association. They started with fish farming, then building shelters and then providing school support. Then, in 1996, they moved on to theatre, music and dance to raise awareness of a variety of social scourges including “child trafficking”, “child witches”, “child soldiers” and the “struggle against AIDS”. Other shows were about “clandestine emigration” and “schooling for girls”, who have to work instead of going to school in certain countries. They started working with Benin, Algeria and Morocco. L’Autre Rive (“The Other Shore”) opened in July 2010 in Doukkala Abda, in Morocco. This Foundation sponsored that show, which provided an opportunity for 11 French, 12 Algerian, 12 Beninese and 15 Moroccan children to work together for a month and sharpen their awareness of others. Omar Chilla and Marguerite Salvy adds, “These exchanges give their self-confidence a fresh boost and help them to open up to others. They are ways of pointing them in the right direction, making them more aware, helping them to think about themselves and others. They come from difficult backgrounds and deprived families. They usually have problems at school – if they go to school at all. They have issues with addictions, too. They come from around the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur area, and from around France (the youth welfare services refer the toughest cases). They work with children in less difficulty, which pulls them upwards, so to speak. So it’s about mixing as much as about cross-fertilisation.”

Albatros (blog)

Since its inception earlier this decade, La Belle Envolée, a cultural atelier in Paris’ 12^th arrondissement, has been working to provide fulfilling experiences for disadvantaged youths by enabling them to enjoy, perform and use art. It does this by organising cultural outings (to the theatre, cinema, museums and concerts), creative-writing workshops, short-film productions, theatre shows, slam sessions, and more. The goal behind all those initiatives is to encourage and build up each youth’s individual personality. It works with youths facing failure (from academic, family and/or social standpoints). They are 13 to 25 years old and live in tough neighbourhoods, and most of them come from immigrant families. Several are in secondary and vocational schools, others have graduated or left school recently and are working. In 2009, under a partnership with La Belle Envolée, the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation pledged to fund short films produced by teenagers in social and community centres in Paris’ 12th and 19th arrondissements. On 5 May 2010, they started shooting a short film based on Ghost, a story that they had written at the creative-writing workshops at the beginning of the school year.

La Belle Envolee

The Sport dans la Ville association has been using sport to leverage integration in 18 sensitive neighbourhoods in the Rhône-Alpes region since 1998. For several of the 2,000 children that play football, basketball or rugby for free, it is now running workshops on wheels as an edu-taining way of helping them to get to grips with reading, maths, speaking and writing. Those workshops take place in a bus, the Apprenti’Bus, where school support ties in with the universe and vocabulary of sports. They run from 5.00 pm to 7.30 pm and call at different neighbourhoods every evening. They cater to 96 kids aged 9 to 13 during the 2009-2010 season, with quizzes, spelling games, charades and word games, plus an opportunity to edit a quarterly newspaper, Le Petit Journal de l’Apprenti’Bus, with reports and interviews created by the group. In May 2010, this Foundation helped it to set up an Apprenti’Bus specifically to teach and build reading and writing skills. This bus works with kids involved in the association’s sports programmes.

Sport dans la ville

Apprenti’Bus