Damien Baldin : “Developing social innovation, a true source of pride.”

Interview with Damien Baldin, Chief Executive Officer of the La France s’engage Foundation

Since 2020, Damien Baldin has held the position of Chief Executive Officer of the La France s’engage Foundation, recognized for its support of high-impact innovative social projects. A laureate of the foundation in 2019 with his association Le Choix de l’école, he is also an administrator of the French Center for Funds and Foundations. In 2020, he ran for municipal elections in Issy-les-Moulineaux, securing the third place with 12.9% of the votes and now serves on the Municipal Council.

A brief look back… La France s’engage is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. What are you most proud of in this journey?

Our greatest source of pride is that over the past 10 years, La France s’engage has enabled fantastic projects to unfold, improving the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of women and men in all territories, both metropolitan and overseas.

In 2023 alone, the associations and companies we support reached 300,000 beneficiaries in essential areas of solidarity: reducing inequalities from birth or in life, restoring social ties, combating violence against women, training for green jobs, promoting the attractiveness of the teaching profession, and social and professional integration for those furthest from training and employment.

We support hundreds of women and men of all ages, from all social, cultural, and geographical backgrounds. They have become social entrepreneurs for a thousand reasons. All of them have changed their lives and the lives of others by finding concrete innovative solutions to social problems.

Among the 233 associations and companies we have supported over the past 10 years, some successes inspire us particularly, such as the VRAC network, which has nearly tripled the number of its beneficiaries under our impetus to make quality food accessible in low-income neighborhoods; La Cloche, which went from 16,000 services rendered by its solidarity merchants to homeless people to 90,000 in 3 years; Villages Vivants, which was able to create a real estate investment trust and raise 1.8 million euros to revitalize rural areas. But also La Cravate Solidaire, Simplon.co, Les P’tits Doudous, ETRE schools… The examples are numerous. They proudly showcase the inventiveness, expertise, and ambition of social innovation!

If, every day, at La France s’engage, we manage to concretely help develop social innovation, it is because we work with a collective dedicated solely to the general interest and which has succeeded in bringing together private and public actors, mutual societies, CAC 40 companies, researchers, and local elected officials, a former President of the Republic and association leaders from all over France. And here too, it is a real source of pride!

In your opinion, what are the main challenges facing impact projects in France today, and more generally, social enterprises ?

As a former association leader and Chief Executive Officer of La France s’engage for the past 4 years, I am all too familiar with the difficulties faced by social enterprises in sustaining and deploying future-proof economic models, their challenges in communication, organization, and attracting human resources, impact measurement, and financing.

Based on this observation, the challenges to be met are threefold:

Financing

Social enterprises need both public and private financial investments as well as donations. They need solidarity finance as much as public generosity because they are companies of the future as much as actors of the general interest. They should also be major beneficiaries of future investments and have easier access to public procurement markets.

Promoting a culture of social enterprise outside the social enterprise sector

I believe that social enterprises should interact more with three essential stakeholders: youth, civil servants, and journalists. I hope that social enterprises will be better known to these audiences through increased initial and ongoing training efforts.

Implementing social enterprise excellence sectors

Social enterprises can provide operational and effective solutions to major and urgent societal challenges that public policies cover little, poorly, or not enough. I am thinking of issues related to aging, housing, health, poverty, education, professional integration, refugee reception, violence against women, food, and early childhood. By structuring themselves into excellence sectors, social enterprises would demonstrate their collective capacity to meet these challenges on both a national and local scale.

And tomorrow… How can social enterprises inspire the “classic” economy for a positive transformation of society ?

By further highlighting their successes and potential.

Social enterprise already accounts for 14% of private employment, which is enormous! And outside of social enterprise, mission-driven companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the notion of companies’ extra-financial value are becoming increasingly important. This is already a positive influence of social enterprise on the classic economy that should be recognized.

I believe in the power of example and the strength of dialogue. At La France s’engage, we witness daily the tremendous synergy that can arise between actors of the conventional economy and those of the social and solidarity economy.

Our Foundation was designed as a trusted third place to enable these encounters, this constructive dialogue, this inspiration.

And I strongly advocate for the representative bodies of the social and solidarity economy and the conventional business world to engage in dialogue in the name of the general interest and social utility. The urgency of social and environmental issues requires us to accelerate this dialogue.