#alstomfoundation

The Alstom Foundation celebrates 1 year of successful partnership with the NGO NESsT together with portfolio social enterprise Concordia Bakery. 

In March 2017, the Alstom Foundation selected NESsT to help scale social enterprises in Romania. Consequently, NESsT Romania, the Alstom Foundation and the humanitarian organization Concordia, a member of NESsT’s portfolio since 2014, signed a one-year partnership with the purpose of supporting Concordia’s Bakery, a social enterprise that employs and trains young people from vulnerable backgrounds.

Concordia received a grant for infrastructure development from the Alstom Foundation and advisory services from NESsT to increase the performance of its operations. The social enterprise purchased a new transportation vehicle and a wrapping machine which enables a variety of clients to be provided with freshly baked, individually wrapped sweet products.

“The support offered by NESsT and Alstom helped us acquire equipment which contributed to operations efficiency, decreased direct costs and freed up production capacity. We are now able to service larger orders, and we can aim to sell more as our capacity level permits. Our increase in sales means more employment opportunities for at-risk youth.”  

As a scaling social enterprise, Concordia faced challenges in increasing its sales levels. The social enterprise manager, Alice Stavride, considered that selling the bread made by Concordia requires a different set of skills: “We are not selling merely bread. We are selling a bread with a story. We need to learn how to craft and tell the story.” NESsT acknowledged and understood this need, hence Concordia was given the opportunity to invest a part of the grant in storytelling and public speaking workshops. The training program helped the social enterprise manager formulate a clearer story of social impact to appeal to a wider audience.  

Over the past year, the Alstom Foundation has been supporting the NGO EducaciÓn 2020 to undertake a pilot project at the Liceo Comercial Puente Alto in Santiago, Chile. This project aimed at testing the efficacity of a new learning technique when applied to students from a disadvantaged part of town.

The overall goal of the project was to bring an innovative transformation to the school through the implementation of the “Tutorial Relationships” methodology, providing students with improved interpersonal and professional skills and the necessary tools to learn autonomously and the improvement of the physical learning environment to better meet student needs. Volunteers from Alstom Chile played an important role in the process, participating in the training of students and teachers, attending learning festivals, and working with both the school and EducaciÓn 2020 on school improvement initiatives.

The Tutorial Relationships model is an alternative learning method that emphasizes the development of autonomous learning skills. The model comes to life through the “tutorial relationship,” in which a tutor guides a student in the process of learning through reflections and questions. Students themselves then become the tutors and the knowledge transfer continues. Studies show that students who learn via the Tutorial Relationships model build self-confidence and significantly improve academic performance. Dropout rates also fall dramatically.

Learning festival at  Liceo Comercial Puente Alto - Photo courtesy of  EducaciÓn 2020.

During the year 30 students benefitted from exposure to this innovative teaching methodology. Their testimonies demonstrate how much they have enjoyed teaching others, developed confidence in their own abilities, and have become motivated to continue their own learning process, all of which will serve them well through adulthood.

The projects selected for support by the Foundation will benefit from funding coming from its 2018/19 budget. As previously, all submissions have to be made by an Alstom employee in the role of “Promoter” acting hand-in-hand with a partner organisation – normally an NGO –which is responsible for delivering the project. All Alstom employees are eligible. The deadline for submissions will be June 30th, 2018. This year, for the first time, all submissions must be made on-line through a new link available through the Foundation website. The axes of the Foundation projects remain the same: Protection of the environment; access to energy and water; access to mobility; and socio-economic development. In the past, 80% of submissions have been in the socio-economic category which has had a very broad definition. Therefore, this year, the category will be refocused on two distinct project types: 

a) the development of skills and employability amongst disadvantaged populations; 

Close to metro line which Alstom is involved in building in Panama City is a school where the education is good but the facilities were poor – the Reino de los Paises Bajos school which educates around 1,500 primary level students in 2 shifts per day.

The Alstom Foundation, working in partnership with the local NGO Fundacion Unidos por la Educacion, committed to helping this school to upgrade its facilities focusing on the sanitary amenities; the kitchen and canteen; the library and part of the garden.

The project, which commenced in 2015, is nearing completion – as witnessed by the Secretary General of the Foundation on his visit there at the end of November. The classroom renovation is yet to be finished and further work is to be done on the green space around the school buildings, but these should be finished early in 2018.

Beyond the Foundation’s support, the project has benefitted from focused volunteering activity from the local Alstom team, together with their families, who spent a day, on a weekend, cleaning and painting classrooms. 40 people can do a lot in a day and the net result was much appreciated by pupils and teachers alike. The team plans to return to do more in the New Year.

In Cambodia, an Alstom Foundation-supported project initiated in May 2016 with GERES NGO comes to a successful conclusion!

Together with NGO “Group for the Environment, Renewable Energy and Solidarity” (GERES) , we set out to deliver a project entitled “Micro-enterprise development and community empowerment in natural resources management in Cambodia”. The main goal of this project was to address the environmental challenge presented by the non-sustainable use of wood fuels as a primary energy source. Moreover the use of inefficient stove and the scarcity of firewood were compromising the off-season income-generating potential of farmers and their families. The idea was to tackle this issue through the market-based dissemination of energy-efficient, multi-fuel productive stoves (IMEPS) along with renewable fuels.  

Three village-based farmer associations/rural communities were engaged in identifying the most representative villages to be involved in a pilot scheme. Following this, the project set out to stimulate -through awareness training- sustainable demand for IMEPS among local food producers and to provide tailored access to eco-stoves installers and renewable biomass fuel suppliers. Thereafter, the aim was to create the conditions for a further scale-up and replication of the solution.

The pilot scheme proved the potential for the improved cookstoves usage among Palm Sugar producers in the province of Kampong Chhnang. All the elements are now in place to allow the entrepreneurs to start the cookstove production business which should take off after the rice harvesting season and before the sugar production season (i.e. between September and December). Viable business plans have been established for each IMEPS entrepreneur and supporting documentation (construction manuals; users notices etc.) has been prepared for the benefit of both supplier and user.

This is one of the 126 shelters that Alstom Foundation together with AFD (Agence française de développement) sponsored to build in Guiuan city, Philippines, as part of the multi-sectorial assistance to local communities in   Eastern Samar affected by Typhoons. French NGO ACTED implemented this project.

An inauguration was organised last week with presence of local authorities the first secretary of French Embassy in Philippines, AFD Country Director, and Simon Cordier, Alstom Project Director in Manila.

This project was selected by Alstom Foundation in March 2016. Other successfully achieved milestones for this project are:

Beneficiaries’ livelihoods have been sustainably reinforced as a result of an integrated approach which leads to an improved access to local markets and an increase in agricultural production.

Local capacities for disaster management have been reinforced and a targeted and quick humanitarian response capacity has been set up.

The Alstom Foundation will support 17 new projects this year. 

The projects that were selected for funding by the Board of the Foundation on 21 September 2017 are spread across all six Alstom Regions and all four of the Foundation’s axes, with a particular focus on social-economic development. An abbreviated list is below.

Professional integration for young people – Cambodia

Addressing welfare gaps in Madhepura – India

“Resourceful women” micro-enterprise development – India

“Small Homes, Big Dreams”: homes; healthcare and education for street kids – India

Faecal sludge management system – Philippines

Rain water tanks – Vietnam

Improving farm commodity transportation – Vietnam

Giving a holiday to child victims of Chernobyl – Italy

Improving social mobility for young people in Liverpool – UK

Housing and employability for disadvantaged young adults – France

Reforestation with native trees – Chile

Empowering indigenous communities to conserve the Papaloapan River watershed – Mexico

Green spaces and recreation areas for a shanty town – Peru

Solar energy for Draria SOS Children's Village – Algeria

Sustainable mobility for human development and labour insertion  – Morocco

Renewable energy for women through micro-finance – Senegal

Renovation of Hornell area youth centre – USA

Now in its 11th year, the Alstom Foundation has supported a total of 168 projects across 52 countries. With a budget of €1 million per year, it supports and funds projects proposed by Alstom’s employees, who team up with local partners and not-for-profit organizations to carry out initiatives aimed at improving living conditions in communities located near the Alstom’s facilities and project sites around the world.