In Boulogne-Billancourt on Wednesday July 2^nd 2008, residents of the Adoma residence welcomed some 150 guests for the unveiling of a vertical garden donated by Stella McCartney last October.
Employees from the association Espaces, PPR volunteers, departments of the town hall and of Adoma … All these partners were present for the completion of an audacious joint project.

At her 2008 spring-summer show, Stella McCartney asked Patrick Blanc, a botanist and a researcher in the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), to build a vertical garden. At the end of the event, both of them decided to present it to an association. At this stage, a partnership with Espaces, a job placement association based on ecology was established and the Foundation coordinated the teams, between luxury and inclusion.
Led by Patrick Blanc’s technicians, Espaces employees took down the vertical garden installed in the prestigious Palais de Chaillot, plant by plant, and tended the plants in the Espaces greenhouses. They then put the vertical garden back up two months later in a social housing for people in precarious situation in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine.
This extraordinary project enabled those involved to discover different worlds and activities.
To Christophe, a botanist in charge of installing the plants and a vertical garden specialist, the experience was a memorable human encounter: “I had never suspected the paths hidden behind the word “inclusion”: these are people like you and I, who have lost their way through some misfortune in life, and I have seen a lot of will to get out of the situation.”

The sustainable partnership with Espaces contributes to opening up new horizons for Espaces employees and to raising awareness among PPR group’s employees on inclusion.
The first exchange took place in June 2007, bringing together the Espaces association and employees of the PPR group’s direct procurement department.
They wished to volunteer in order to “take part in a meaningful action and share other life experiences”.
Meeting Espaces employees while cleaning one of their sites located in the 16^th district of Paris enabled them to understand that inclusion helps people whose careers have run into sometimes unexpected difficulties:
“I set up my own company as a computer engineer. There weren’t enough orders coming in and I went bankrupt. Then my wife left me, and I found myself without anything and without any chance of finding work, as being over 40”, said one employee.
These PPR teams renewed the experience on June 6^th in helping Espaces teams to create a composter in the south of the 15^ème district, and a second volunteering exercise was scheduled to take place in November 2008.