We enjoyed the coolness of the hall in a luxury hotel in Chennai, where one can find...a French bakery! It exposed to us appetising pastries as well as an assortment of small bread rolls and beautiful baguettes. Was it out of the ordinary? We met Alexis de Ducla, the young French businessman who had opened this shop during a quite peculiar adventure.

When Alexis was ready to enter business school and already imagining his career in finance, he had a crucial encounter that disrupted his plans. Father Ceyrac, who is a very active person with the poor in India, had come to give a lecture about the Dalits’ cause in Alexis’ high school. The latter did not attend the lecture as he preferred to take a break in a neighbouring cafe. Destiny is sometimes persistent because it was exactly where they both met. Father Ceyrac was convinced that Alexis had human qualities to help him in his fight against poverty and invited him to come to India. The next day, Alexis bought his flight tickets. Then, he organised cultural events to collect money before his departure. A few months later, he was in Madurai, in the region of Tamil Nadu, where he worked for two months in an association founded by Father Ceyrac. He got bitten by the bug...
                                  Meeting with Father Ceyrac

When he came back, he got into ESSEC, a prestigious French business school, where he specialised in social entrepreneurship. His degree course allowed him to go back regularly to India over the five years. He could alternate courses and trips to Madurai. During this period, he worked with an association that supports the Dalits in their villages by giving them education and professional training. There, he met a French baker who had come to teach. That is when Alexis had the idea to open a ‘bakery-school’ in Chennai to train young people coming from underprivileged backgrounds, and allow them to find a job in luxury catering. The profits from the sales of the bakery would finance the functioning of the school. The adventure was launched. He created an association and found financing to start his project. He had the opportunity to practice what he had learned during his studies and to create a structure in which profit is not an end, but a means to serve a social objective.
 
In 2006, La Boulangerie ('The Bakery') was born. The training personnel consists of a head baker and six employees. The welcoming capacity is of 24 apprentices per year, all on block-release training. They are recruited on poverty and motivation criteria. They get bed and board and their laundry done for them, and they receive wages to help them start their professional lives once the training is over. The first two years came off successfully, La Boulangerie was self-financing at 50%. Unfortunately, the global financial crisis occurred and the funds dried up. Alexis tried to get things back on an even keel by augmenting the self-financing rate, but the continuous support of the school suffered because of it. When realising the limits of his model, he restricted the number of admissions in 2008, before closing the school at the start of the new school year in 2009. It allowed him to end with a positive assessment: out of 35 trained apprentices, 30 already have a job, and Alexis is helping the last ones with their job search.
                                  Alexis de Ducla and one of the employees of La Boulangerie

Alexis did not give up. He went to visit numerous associations across India to study their functioning and understand their strengths. He saw that the organisations that work are those who adopt clear and coherent rules, without ‘romanticising poverty’ according to one of his mentors. Most of the training on offer has to be paid for, and it gives merit to those who get involved. Alexis gave the example of an organisation that offers ultra specialised training, for three months, at an intensive rate. The manager worked on the principle that the poor do not have the means to stay any longer without a job and need to be able to make their training profitable quickly.

Alexis is now thinking about a new project, where he will be able to make the most of the experience he gained. He turned away from an ordinary career in order to engage his talents in that which he believes. We believe him to be one of the people who has invented and will lead the way to social entrepreneurship, which gives priority back to human values.

Gabrielle
(Translation: Yolene Dabreteau)