Bruno Dabout (EDHEC Master 1982): “Generate self-confidence and confidence in others to combat social exclusion”

Poverty can be fought on many different terrains. Bruno Dabout (EDHEC Master 1982) has had first-hand experience of some of them at ATD Fourth World, the international non-governmental movement of which he was appointed agent general in October. Over the course of his career, he has lived in the heart of so-called “difficult” neighbourhoods, from New Orleans to Thailand, with a view to effecting change from the inside and enabling many vulnerable families to recover their dignity. Here he shares his vision of what it means to live together.

How did you first encounter the ATD Fourth World movement?

I was a student at EDHEC Business School in Lille and was passionate about entrepreneurship and solidarity – I wanted to change the world. As part of a “street library” initiative organised by ATD Fourth World, I began to accompany children from the Wazemmes neighbourhood. They weren’t just from working-class backgrounds, but from families that had been socially excluded. I was immediately struck by the fact that change and the success of initiatives can be measured through people’s perspective rather than through ideas. The parents could see their children develop an appetite for learning.

How can poverty be defined?

Together with Oxford University, we conducted international participatory research from 2016 to 2019 with the aim of describing the dimensions of poverty in the global North and South (Tanzania, Bolivia, Bangladesh, France, Great Britain and the United States) together with national research teams that combined university academics and activists with first-hand knowledge of poverty. Income, access to decent work and health and education systems were recurring themes, but the testimonials recorded also emphasised the physical, mental and intellectual suffering of not being considered as a person, as well as having to resist on an everyday basis. Nor should social and institutional maltreatment be underestimated. In Haiti, children die from malnutrition at a young age. When a mother sees that her child is not developing, she has to rely on herself, but it can also happen that neighbours mock her. To change this, we need nutritional recovery programmes, but we also need a chain of relationships between mothers who can look out for one another. Institutional maltreatment can arise, for example, when children are separated from their parents following a decision by a judge due to educational failings. Parents’ visiting rights attract a lot of media attention, so they’re always being watched from the outside, which makes it even more difficult to develop harmonious parent–child relationships.

Is access to education and knowledge an effective weapon in getting rid of social inequalities and poverty? 

I would say access to high-quality education. Even brilliant pupils cannot be sure of accessing professional training. Academic failure can arise from the instability of one’s family life or evictions. Contemporary society has progressed over the last 20 years so that more children can access schooling, but there are still too many children who are in school but learning little. In the school environment, the knowledge and courage of one’s family and background must be respected and recognised. There are still a great many reciprocal prejudices. When my children were in secondary school in a multicultural neighbourhood in Paris, the parents were afraid that teachers weren’t looking after their children enough, and the teachers were afraid that the parents weren’t looking after their children. Some parents didn’t dare attend meetings, and the teachers didn’t understand why. This is the kind of thing that one can really change by living in the neighbourhood; what is needed is collective momentum. The most important thing is to create self-confidence and confidence in others. Being able to speak freely is an essential point of departure. And as long as you don’t believe that change is possible, it’s impossible for it to come about.

Is access to higher education facilitated if that confidence and momentum are built up as early as primary school?

It takes time. In the places where we had outreach relationships with families, we often managed to get their last child to complete their baccalaureate. Even though their other children didn’t make it as far as the CAP (vocational certificate), that didn’t mean that we hadn’t achieved anything together. Everything depends on the success of the interlocutors in the families’ neighbourhood and the success of the team. Finding your first job is an important step, but there are other steps after that. Employers have to give them a chance. I’m particularly proud of one child we got involved in photography when he was a preteen, and who went on to become a photographer. Another, who came from a family with a long history of poverty, became a well-known painter. He passed the entrance exam for the École des Beaux-Arts by bringing along his paintings on cardboard boxes he had salvaged. He had the talent and the opportunity to work and learn at ATD Fourth World. That kind of encounter, that presence and rootedness can be achieved in very poor neighbourhoods. All kinds of talents can emerge, and not only in sport and art.

What can business school graduates bring to these projects?

When I defended my dissertation at the end of my studies on the policies of companies in Roubaix-Tourcoing when it came to non-qualified workers, a subject that really resonated with them, a member of the teaching staff told me I should have been an educator, which kind of reveals the gap there is on these kinds of issues. I built up the administrative and financial dimension of ATD Fourth World over a period of 10 years. I alternated between missions to support staff, raise funds, manage projects and engage in strategic and ethical reflections. You need to know how to save money, but also create pride in the expenditure you commit to. We tried to build up a very horizontal organization where the people looking for money were not the same as those in charge of the projects being funded. There is collective intelligence that needs to be constructed. What I learned at EDHEC was very useful in both technical and human terms: building up an organization, having the courage to take on challenges and create encounters and alliances that nobody believed in initially. Another aspect is creating work, finding agreements with artisans or companies but in a way that allows people to prove themselves, and sometimes fail, but to really get several opportunities. In New York we are currently trying to launch an eco-social business, a company that processes electronic waste and will hire young parents and organise an associated preschool to enable people from poor backgrounds to work and offer the very best to their young children.

How would you sum up your current position and responsibilities?

I’m the agent general, and I work with two deputies. A team of regional heads directly support the hundred-odd teams ATD Fourth World has around the world. We also have an international centre with teams that have cross-cutting support responsibilities in relation to communication, international advocacy, finance and administration, as well as evaluating initiatives rolled out. The agent general appoints people for a range of key missions. We also oversee mission changes between different regions in the world for permanent volunteers. Staff management and creating long-term career paths are core aspects of my work. In a few places with major security problems, we phone our staff teams each week to get the latest news, and make sure they’re not living in fear. We also listen to what families, teachers, school principals, hospital doctors, entrepreneurs, civil society contributors and the French embassy have to say. With the information they give us, sometimes we have to tell the staff team to come home or at least leave the place they’re in. It’s very rewarding to reach out to people, witness their courage and what they can succeed together. There is also the financial aspect: finding the money and investing in innovative projects. Some of them are risky and put us on the front line. We take the time to choose the right direction for our initiatives at the level of each country and each neighbourhood.

What’s the ideal profile to get involved with ATD Fourth World? 

We have a base of around 400 permanent volunteers and tens of thousands of people who have made lasting commitments on a volunteer basis or in return for a small compensation or the reimbursement of expenses. In France or similar countries, permanent staff receive around the minimum wage. In very poor countries, wages are more in line with those of a teacher or healthcare worker. We practice wage equality within a given country, regardless of one’s role or skills. We reimburse one annual journey for expatriates, sometimes more if the location they’re living in is difficult, so that staff can have a breather.

Many permanent volunteers come for a year and then find they like it and bounce from project to project, from mission to mission, sometimes even dedicating their whole life to it. That was the case for me. We are looking to recruit reliable and motivated people who have an established profession or strong work experience. But they will always find that they have to reinvent their profession.

What kind of changes are you seeing in the involvement of young graduates today?

Nowadays, young adults are looking for meaning in their work, even though they’re not all looking for something as radical as ATD Fourth World. There are fascinating challenges to pursue for different types of people. Not everyone has to go to Haiti or the Democratic Republic of the Congo! In any case there has been a generational shift with greater awareness. There are many people who really don’t want to work anymore for a company that places its money in tax havens and adopts scandalous practices in countries where they don’t have to abide by the law. Younger generations don’t accept corruption, whether it’s in politics or corporate practices. But institutional change takes a long time. The big firms are now realising that to recruit the kind of profiles they’re after, they have to be ethical, stop greenwashing and do more than just appear to have fair policies.

A few members of ATD Fourth World were at the COP26 in Glasgow. What was their role? 

At COP26, we worked on people and relationships, we established new contacts, but it’s not the kind of event where you achieve extraordinary things in terms of linking social justice and environmental justice. At COP21 in Paris in 2015, we managed to make environmental associations aware of the fight against poverty. They weren’t necessarily conscious that families living in poverty were often unfavourably affected by environmental policies. Plans to combat climate change are not thought out with them in mind. We achieved something incredible at the UN in 2015 with the adoption of sustainable development goals that included the transformative objective of “leaving no-one behind”, which means reaching first of all those most removed. Summits are the final outcome of lengthy preparations in advance. For 4 years, we had held breakfast meetings in New York with representatives of States and NGOs. We offered them a space in which they could speak freely without getting caught up by having to defend positions. Although there is some way to go and change is still ongoing, I remain optimistic. My hope is that today’s educated young generation will be able to take initiatives where there are serious environmental situations, because there really are economic projects for the environmental transition that we need to think about, conduct and assess together with those living in extreme poverty.

More about ATD Fourth World: https://www.atd-fourthworld.org/

Get involved in ATD Fourth World: https://www.atd-fourthworld.org/get-involved/join-a-project/