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In France, employers are betting on solidarity by opening their offices to the homeless. An initiative launched by the Bureaux du cœur in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) two years ago.
In Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), in the evenings and on weekends, Moustapha Dahmani unfolds the convertible sofa in the conference room of a telecommunications company to spend the night there. A parenthesis for the man, who became homeless after family problems, made possible thanks to the initiative of the Bureaux du cœur. “It allows me to regain confidence in life. It is by coming here that I found a job, and now I’m going to look for an apartment”, he explains.
The boss of the Nantes company, Yves Le Gohebel, has been welcoming him for several months. An experiment “enriching”, between two worlds that do not usually coexist. This is the idea of the Bureaux du cœur, which has encouraged employers to show solidarity for two years. “It is to serve the people who need it, so that they can fit in. It is a chain, and we are a small link”, considers the leader. To get started, he simply convinced his insurance to include a guest.