Social innovation at the CSTJF with La France s’engage

• Every year, the La France s’engage Foundation organizes a major national contest to select the most innovative sustainable development projects.
• Through its corporate foundation, TotalEnergies is the first private player to support the La France s’engage program, kicked off by the French government in 2014.
• For the first time, the final jury was held in Pau, and 20 employees from the CSTJF and the PERL took part, alongside 40 or so players from local civil society.

Since its launch, La France s’engage has invested 1.8 million euros in eight social and solidarity economic structures in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region, including 200,000 euros in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department. For this edition of the major annual contest, 25 regional teams submitted their proposals for projects, and six out of the 454 applications were from the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department.  

The close, long-standing ties between La France s’engage and the TotalEnergies Corporate Foundation are part of the "Creating Partnerships" initiative, a crucial factor when it comes to social and solidarity economics. Welcoming the competition’s jury to the CSTJF campus is a perfect example of this. Volunteer employees and participants representing local councils, businesses and general interest structures, met for an entire afternoon to examine 70 applications.

Upstream of this unprecedented event, employees were invited to attend a conference on Citizenship engagement, the first of five annual meetings on the topic. Jacques-Emmanuel Saulnier, General Manager of the TotalEnergies Foundation, Enora Hamon, Deputy General Director of the La France s’engage Foundation, and local partners under sponsorship agreements, gave their perspectives on this issue.

Watch the first of these events that took place at TotalEnergies in Pau in this short video: