ESC: Supporting the national community of volunteers

Compagnons Bâtisseurs is a non-formal education and solidarity movement created in the 1950s and nowadays present in 12 French regions. The main objective of the action is to help poor people living in degraded housing to improve their living conditions. This involves both acting in people's homes and in outdoor spaces (eg: poor neighbourhoods). The principle of intervention is simple since it is based on the active participation of the inhabitants according to the principle of "doing, doing with, doing together" in order to allow them to acquire new knowledge and, for some, to break their loneliness. Each year, more than 200 French and international young people commit 8 to 12 months to these projects in order to fight in a concrete way against bad housing but also to live new experiences useful for their life course. The presence of volunteers also has a significant impact for the inhabitants of these homes because it reinforces the creation of links with the inhabitants and therefore a greater involvement in the projects. They feel particularly reassured by the learning posture of these young people and identify with them. Finally, the cultural and social mix provided by the European Solidarity Corps is a source of enrichment for young French volunteers, the majority of whom have experienced complicated journeys (eg: school dropouts, long-term unemployed) and have little discovered the world. International volunteers also learn from these encounters. Since 2012, the National Organization Compagnons Bâtisseurs has also been coordinating short-term mobility projects promoting the inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities and allowing the establishment of courses for French people and for internationals. In general, the interest linked to this international dimension of the projects carried out by the Compagnons Bâtisseurs is to enable young people and inhabitants of poor neighbourhoods to better understand the world and to act on their openness, a vector of tolerance and solidarity.