Parigi (Stefania)

Executive Director of Samusocial (the mobile emergency medical service for homeless people) / Patrol with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (9 November 2009)

Stefania Parigi joined Samusocial in 2002 and was rapidly offered the post of CEO by founder Xavier Emmanuelli. Parigi, born of an Italian father and French mother, had several lives before becoming one of the key figures at Samusocial. After living in Chad, she worked as a journalist in Cairo before moving for many years to the United States. Back in France in 1992, the young woman joined Nintendo, the famous video game company, where she set up a disability support programme. She displayed a similar social conscience in coordinating communications for the operation entitled Together against AIDS. She then joined Samusocial after seeing a small ad. Her first project involved a psychosocial patrol accompanied by a psychiatrist with Hospital Esquirol, Saint-Maurice, Val-de-Marne, in an attempt to reach out to homeless people. She then drew on her hands-on skills to restructure the 115 platform, the Samusocial emergency number. A problem while reaching an operator led the young director to propose a move to new premises in Ivry-sur-Seine and the creation of a new database. This led to callers being better identified and monitored, and the tripling of the call handling capacity. She sees this as a way of better understanding a population which is often the subject of entrenched prejudices. “We talk about the homeless, but what does that mean?” asked Stefania Parigi in Elle. The tendency is to think of down-and-outs, but the term covers a huge diversity. We cater to12,000 people, 7,000 in hotels, 5,000 in centres and 70% of our budget goes to families.”