Editor’s Note
This article highlights the vital work of social reintegration programs, where practical skills training meets tangible community benefit. The story of Djoulbé and the Ares workshop underscores how such initiatives provide both meaningful employment pathways and valuable local services.
At the Ares (Association for Economic and Social Reintegration) workshop in Noisy-le-Sec, still being set up, Djoulbé, 39, assembles the partitions of a storage unit that will be installed in the offices of the Seine-Saint-Denis departmental council. Like the five other employees in reintegration, he previously worked in logistics or handling. He performed parcel loading and unloading tasks at the La Poste sorting center in Goussainville.
Having arrived in France in 2020, he now envisions a qualifying training course in this field.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, where this workshop was created, the association supports approximately 95 full-time equivalent employees, or 170 to 180 people per year, with a return-to-employment or entry-into-training rate of 65%.
Originally, Ares developed as a service provider in labor-intensive sectors: logistics, construction, then digital, viticulture, and green spaces. The consortium of companies and associations claims to be the inventor of the concept of an integration temporary work agency in 1991. Starting in 2004, it multiplied its integration structures: in Paris in 2005, in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne in 2006, in Seine-et-Marne in 2016, in Rhône in 2022. Concurrently, the circular economy has grown in its revenue share (14% compared to 59% for logistics in 2022).
Given that the construction sector generates 70% of waste in France, Ares thus positions its activity within the framework of the ecological transition, tackling reuse in this sector.
After a testing phase in the premises of Atelier 1920 at Fort d’Aubervilliers, the Ares branch in Seine-Saint-Denis moved in early 2023 to the Transition Factory, where it rents a 480-square-meter warehouse, as well as a 250-square-meter outdoor space. It is in this industrial wasteland abandoned for 30 years that the Est Ensemble inter-municipal authority and the cities of Romainville and Noisy-le-Sec where it is located launched a new circular economy hub, inaugurated on November 29.
Owned by the Île-de-France Public Land Establishment (Epfif) since 2021, the 15,000 square meters of the former Saft factory were only one-third occupied, by about twenty companies working mainly in construction. Following a call for projects launched in 2022, 17 Social and Solidarity Economy (ESS) structures joined the industrial wasteland for a temporary three-year occupancy. But at rents well below market rates: 84 euros per square meter for activity space and 91 euros for office space. The selection criterion: promoting an entrepreneurship focused on ecological transition, solidarity, and prioritizing local employment. Foundry, space planning, furniture creation, but also jewelry, ceramics, cabinetmaking, or carpentry: the range of activities at the Transition Factory is wide.
For its workshop, Ares invested approximately 350,000 euros, a good part for acquiring cutting machines. It will be complemented by another workshop where glass from windows recovered from construction sites will be broken to be reprocessed by Saint-Gobain.