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*The Humble Heroes
*Presents
*Jean-Guy Henckel
*A Humble Hero
*What is a Humble Hero?
*A Humble Hero is someone who isn't looking for the limelight
*who doesn't claim to be a model...
*A Humble Hero is someone who is determined to love...
*to love, come high come low, and that is what being a hero means!
*A "Humble Hero" is lurking in all of us...
*"Don't wait to be perfect
*"before doing something good !"
*Abbé Pierre (1912-2007)
The family life routine that I saw around me
simply didn't interest me, that's all.
I couldn't see myself finding the prettiest girl in the village
marrying her, going to work at Peugeot Factory
and living out my whole life there. I respect all that,
but it's just not my thing.
I didn't know what I wanted, but that wasn't it.
I needed to go elsewhere and try different things.
It all began in the Franche-Comté, in the world of factory workers
from Peugeot, "la Peuge".
This is where Jean-Guy grew up.
He wasn't a rebel, but he didn't quite fit in.
Which is maybe why he felt a strong pull
to outsiders,to people rejected by society.
He became an educator and worked for several years
in a shelter for social rehabilitation,
before he felt a calling to deal with a specific social problem,
namely farmers in trouble.
The moment is the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s.
That is when this form of poverty emerged, with all its consequences.
And he, the city dweller,
decided to tackle this alarming issue
and found a fantastic and completely innovative solution:
the “Jardins de Cocagne” (gardens of milk and honey).
Here is the portrayal of Jean-Guy Henckel,
a "Humble Hero".
He is someone people really respect.
You can't say no to him.
He is someone whom
I would follow all the way.
He is a beautiful personality...
He's a 4-star man. It's great.
You feel completely
drawn in by his energy and the life inside of him.
He has an inner fire,
because he has that intelligence of the heart.
He has given his whole life to helping these people who have nothing.
What he did, actually, was to roll up his sleeves
and find an answer.
Doing good is one thing. But doing it well is a real job.
It requires huge energy.
This is what is moving the world.
Thank you for this rehabilitation.
What he created is magnificent.
Thankfully, there are people like that.
There.
You need vegetables. They need work.
Together, let's grow solidarity.
Jean-Guy, what kind of a child were you?
What kind of a personality?
*Jean-Guy Henckel Founder of Jardins de Cocagne.
I lived in a little village in the Franch-Comté...
Onans was its name. A tiny village.
My grandfather's bistrot was across the street from my home.
My parents worked a lot.
I was very free for the first ten years.
The thousands of acres of forest around us were mine for the asking.
There were moments when I was a little less free
when I had to go to school.
But we mostly did what we felt like.
We would go home on foot. We'd make a detour or two.
We'd play soccer near the village,
we'd go into the woods and build cabins.
We would go home when we heard my mother call us
and that made a lot of noise. So we had to go home.
At the time, my mother worked at the Post Office,
in a place I found fascinating,
since this was in the middle of the 50s.
Like in the old movies, she was at the switchboard
to connect the calls.
The famous switchboard operators in those days.
My father was a mason and after that, he worked
at the Peugeot plant.
Here, this was considered the ideal life plan.
You didn't really wonder about the future.
You just had to work for Peugeot.
Jean-Guy, you decided to become an educator, so first
you left to work for a year,
your first experience of work.
That experience was really the key.
We were supposed to do what is called a "preliminary internship",
in other words, one year's work. So there I was
working in an IMP, a "Medical-Pedagogical Institute",
that was the terminology at the time, terrible,
which took in
the "slightly retarded with associated disorders."
We had a younger brother
who was born disabled, he had Down syndrome.
When we talk about accepting difference,
these aren't just words, we were born to it.
I have known Jean-Guy, for almost 40 years.
We were in an educator school together for 3 years.
We were enthusiastic, we wanted, to learn,
to understand and change the world,
actually... Besançon is the city of the Lip company.
With all those revolts.
It was very intense.
Some might think we were just anarchists,
but we weren't.
We just had this belief in change and we were driven by this belief.
Were you a hippie?
I looked a bit like one.
He was like most social workers in those days,
with long hair,
a long beard.
He wasn't a hippie, he was just a little
part of that whole movement around Kerouac,
the spirit of travel. That's all. That whole type of literature.
And mostly, being open to the world.
Someone who wasn't all stale,
who was bubbling,
full of interest in everything,
with an incredible sense of humor.
So there you were, getting some real training
to become a professional educator.
That lasted 3 years.
Three years of theory with internships here and there.
And the last one is the one we choose ourselves,
we could choose
a CHRS, a shelter for social rehabilitation.
- And you stayed there. - After having worked
with children, with the handicapped,
with young girls at risk for prostitution,
delinquents,
there I was in this shelter
filled with adults.
At the time, this was a very specialized shelter
they took in people who had come out of prison.
Among the people I met there
at the beginning of the 70s,
there were still some former prisoners who had been in the forced labor camps
on the île de Ré, in French Guyana, etc.
This was an adult environment,
of heavenly tramps who had chosen their lifestyle,
who had been dishonest with society, and had done the time to pay for the crime,
I liked working there.
The people you have just described are precisely those
whom everyone rejects, with whom nobody wants to live. And you,
you really wanted to live near them. Isn't that strange.
Where is the morality in that?
"Where is the morality?" Is the morality to reject them?
For me, morality mean, in fact, to ...
These are people who, when you get to know them individually,
are really fascinating.
What I like in Jean-Guy was his capacity
to transform someone who smells bad,
who is unshaven,
broken down,
alcoholic, because these gentlemen were severe alcoholics,
into people who were like characters in a novel,
who suddenly, take on a dimension...
like in a strange novel. Suddenly, they were no longer just bums.
When you became an educator, and this was around
1975, 1976, something like that.
We had started feeling the initial impact of the first oil crisis.
How do you see the big picture for people who went through
that shelter?
Well, if you consider that from 1945 to 1975 we had the "Thirty Boom Years",
then I would qualify the following 25 years as the "Twenty-Five Bust Years".
We quickly reached over a million unemployed,
which was touted as being the first sign of a looming dangerous revolution,
then came 2 million then 3 million unemployed.
Then we discovered that there were huge inequalities in the land.
And what we really became interested in,
is a group of people we hadn't expected at all:
the farmers,
farmers in trouble. Their farms
were operational all right, but they were in such heavy debt
that everything they earned with their hard work
was barely enough to pay back the loans.
And the farm community was full of doubt:
there was one crisis after another,
mad cow disease, the dioxin chicken scandal, etc.
Sheep trembling disease...
Everyone was starting to wonder what they were eating.
These things emerged at the time.
And these points started coming together in our minds.
Rehabilitation, people who were in trouble, the farmers,
farming not doing well...
And seeing all that, we needed an idea.
For a year and a half, you really
thought long and hard about the situation.
A thousand ideas were tossed around and at last we found the concept.
There we were, seeing thousands of farmers
fighting and struggling with health and sanitary problems,
because they were using chemicals,
that harm the earth, and harm the farmer
and also harm the consumer.
And immediately we also saw the obvious answer:
and that was organic farming.
Your idea was really to create a mix.
Some farmers stayed in their farms,
but there are also city-dwellers who need a new start,
and who can learn what it is to work the land.
In addition to that, thanks to organic farming,
they develop new self-respect.
Mixing different people
is my big problem in this country,
people dealing with
socially integrating outsiders, and how they are treated
in this country.
When a woman is in trouble, she is handled in one place,
and a man will go somewhere else,
for the disabled, it will be yet another...
If you're young, you'll go to one place,
if you're old, you go elsewhere. I hate that.
That isn't what real life is about.
Real life is mixing different people together,
men, women,
people who are qualified, those who aren't,
country-people, city-dwellers.
And to do this with work that has meaning
and is grounded in a place,
where you can really see
how people start becoming much more positive about life
in such places where all sorts of people are together,
rather than dealing with each group separately.
The virtuous cycle trickles all the way down,
meaning this new concept of responsible consumption.
Responsible consumption was actually
the challenge of the early 90s.
The ideas was to say:
"Will there be enough consumers who are aware,
"and informed enough to accept these new rules we are suggesting?"
You have to have customers.
This is a great system
because the customers are part of the project.
Entire families commit to the process,
they are partners called "consumactors" in French.
They agree to pay a small contribution,
in addition to their shopping basket, of 20 euros a year,
to support the network.
Super! Your vegetable baskets
which you are planning to market very soon,
have to be paid for beforehand and you take them without choosing,
we'e all for it.
Personally, I don't want to be just a consumer,
I want to be a prosumer.
These are vegetables, that truly are "living".
You are what you eat.
Of course, if you go to a supermarket,
you select your product, put it in the cart,and that's all.
Everyone has their little cart.
Basically,
what this is, is responsible consumption.
There are people who don't want to buy
simply because marketing tells them to,
because the supermarkets are filled with products.
They have decided to buy organic
and deal directly with those who produce organic food.
We are coming now to the adventure of the very first Jardin de Cocagne.
Again, this was a beautiful adventure but not an easy one.
No. We found some land plots. and it wasn't easy
to explain to traditional farmers from the Franche-Comté region
that we were going to be both social and organic, everything they feared.
He told me about this project,
and I said to myself :
"This whole thing makes no sense.
"And then,
"we're not going to have bums working the fields.
"They aren't farmers, they are not going to like this, this isn't their thing.
"And Jean-Guy knows nothing about organic farming."
I came here with what experience I had.
I had some experience in farming
and working in a group doing farmwork.
What I was a little worried about was really the fact
that they weren't permanent workers.
In other words
they would stay 6 months, or a year, and bam, you'd start all over.
I thought that this idea
wasn't very realistic.
Catherine and Didier,
the first two market gardeners
who were hired in Besançon,
were key to the project.
Because they know how to work the earth
and were passionate about this project.
They watched me racing around looking for money,
equipment, etc.
They weren't worried.
They knew that if they planted at this very moment,
there would be beautiful radishes to deliver a few weeks later.
We're not the first to see it. Psychiatrists, for the past 100 years,
know very well that rather than give a lot of drugs and medication
or use a straightjacket for people who are in trouble,
or even who have psychiatric problems,
better to work a plot of land, which has real benefits.
It rebuilds you, makes you feel good.
It gives you peace.
Growing things heals the psyche. It also heals the body.
With very basic needs requiring daily solutions,
the main issue was how do we eat today and tomorrow,
it's difficult for us to imagine ourselves in the future.
This seasonal work gives us a new ownership on a future.
Putting people who haven't worked in a long time in a position to do a job,
to do this with great respect,
not a kick in the behind, but rather by surroundings
such as nature, with the rhythms of nature
and the patience, of nature,
I believe this has a very positive effect on a person's psychology,
and on groups as a whole.
A reconciliation with your own self
is the first task to accomplish
before moving on to the next thing,
and this means social relationships, your job, things like that.
You have to get your confidence back and feel you can do it.
I showed up here in June 2004.
But physically, I didn't know, whether I was ready
since I hadn't been working for 8 years.
I made a huge effort, and little by little,
I managed to regain a desire to work
as well as motivation.
When I started, I felt real fear.
I was afraid, worried that I wouldn't succeed.
"I had never grown anything.
"Would I make it?
"Would they keep me?" I had no self-confidence at all.
It was hard to work in the Vosges region.
I accepted any and all temporary assignments.
Garbage management, this was just a job like any other.
After all, I had to make a living.
I accepted that, I replaced the postman,
but it was all temporary work.
First, I was fired when I had a permanent job.
And after that, I only managed to find short temporary assignments.
One temporary contract after another,
I couldn't find anything better.
I came here because I hadn't had a job in 3 years.
I took care of my son.
Of course one has to note that there aren't many jobs around these days.
So there are no more jobs. No job, no money.
We are a springboard.
People have a past,and afterwards they'll have a new past.
But our responsibility,
is really this, these social rehabilitation initiatives,
to give these people the best possible capacities
to enable them, on their own,
to build a future for themselves.
We have this dual requirement both to actually produce
and to develop capacity for the future,
and this involves what we call the special process of manageoring,
the synergy between managing and mentoring.
We call it manageoring
because this is really the core of our work.
Here, I organize workshops,
some afternoons, to try to look for
what we are imagining in terms of a professional life.
At the age of 40, I just didn't know what I was going to do with my life.
Now, I know.
This gave me the time and capacity
to change things in my life,
to make decisions,
sometimes important ones. That's why the Jardins de Cocagne,
is a real springboard.
You cannot stay there long.
You have to take advantage of the time you spend there
to share things, to get your life back,
to experience new things
and try to change or to rebuild yourself.
At the Jardins de Cocagne, I received training.
A volunteer, who was a retired teacher,
came to the Jardins de Cocagne to prepare me for a written exam
for my future school.
Once I passed that test,
they brought in a coach
to prepare me for the oral part of the exam.
Which I also passed.
Seeing that I was a somewhat nervous person,
I was also given relaxation training,
again, with a volunteer.
I was fully supported and guided.
I wanted to stay here, because for me,
this was like a second chance.
It helped me a great deal,
physically of course, but mainly psychologically.
The Jardins de Cocagne, is the exact opposite
of the job I had before.
I worked in a factory,
on an assembly line.
I was in a closed place. There was no natural light.
There was noise. Lots of noise.
And the cadence you have to follow in a factory.
Whereas here... What I really like in this work
is being in the outdoors,
hearing the birds, and seeing the light of day,
being outdoors.
Vegetables, the earth, I love all that.
It's a complete change.
Here, at the Jardins de Cocagne,
they explain things and show things to us. It's hands-on.
They show us how to plant, so sow,
how to pick, and then we do it.
We manage to do it on our own. We're allowed to make a mistake.
Knowledge. Everyone comes here with his own bit of knowledge.
We share the knowledge and our education.
We're not always right, but we're not always wrong.
Once you have listened to these people and watched them live,
and you have detected in them
those invisible qualities, suddenly,
it isn't them receiving from you, it is you receiving from them.
I feel that every person carries a kind of sun inside.
Life is magnificent,
even in the strong wind.
Now, I am a salaried employee.
My job is to be a family assistant.
My life has truly changed.
Lots of hope.
This has renewed my heart and put a big smile on my face.
I am proud of working and I know the purpose of my work.
I am proud of my work.
I am very proud of my work.
Can you tell us where the idea came from
for the Fleurs de Cocagne ?
Systems in place to help women get back into the workplace
provide jobs that are not always considered to be very uplifting.
I am thinking, of course, of cleaning or ironing. That type of thing.
There was something missing. We told ourselves:
"What do we have in our hearts,
"for our number one job-type namely farming, how is it uplifting?"
And we thought of flowers for the ladies.
Flowers bring beauty, the beauty of life.
Flowers are useless, but they are so...
so necessary ! to move forward, be optimistic,
because there are beautiful things in life,
even though we have hard times.
I feel like an artist.
Can you give me the numbers that reflect your success ?
120 Jardins de Cocagne,
4 000 people in work rehabilitation,
600 managerial and executive positions,
as well as social and professional mentors,
technical supervisors,
the entire administrative and secretariat staff,
and what we call "the sales staff",
the people who keep the network of members alive.
On top of this we have NGOs that were created locally.
An NGO works with volunteers.
There are also 1 200 volunteers.
Lastly, there are the consumers-***-members,
which is a little over 20 000 families who eat our produce,
each week they buy a basket of produce from the 120 Jardins de Cocagne.
Now you are a victim of your own success.
You now have competition.
Baskets of produce
are being offered in many places in all sorts of outlets.
How are you planning to deal with this situation?
What plans are you making for the future?
If you imagine the next 20 years,
again, the world is shifting and changing.
There are new forms of poverty.
Everyone is offering baskets of vegetables.
Mass retailers are doing it,
our friends from the Amap and so are farmers...
And at the same time
there are more and more people who are in trouble, have lost their jobs.
12 million people are considered poor.
The public authorities will not be able to manage alone.
The action plan we worked on
was to imagine a major cooperation
with the world of business.
We have the capacity, very often,
in our rehabilitation business, to innovate through economic activity,
but we are short on resources.
And that is the real issue.
This is also the reason why we try,
both because this is our belief and because we need it,
to find new alliances
with others who are able to help us, who want to help us.
There is nothing to be ashamed of, quite the opposite,
In trying to find solutions and support
in the private sector.
In the past 2 or 3 years, We have started to examine
the issue of fighting against poverty,
the issue of the environment, and sustainable development.
That was the contact point Between the foundation and the project:
This incredible man who, for years,
has been thinking about poverty
and the environment.
Jean-Guy Henckel, I met him
4 years ago, when I started working in this foundation.
He is one of those people you cannot avoid meeting
if you are involved
in social action in France.
The idea we had...
as a highway concession company in France,
with unused land areas alongside our highways,
we thought it would be a good idea to lend out these land plots
for new gardens.
Every garden we supported
further confirmed the benefits
of this social, business, and environmental model
that Jean-Guy had imagined when he began this adventure.
He brings us closer,
as a Public Service foundation, to different State entities
local authorities, the public funding entity,corporate philanthropies,
very large corporations, consulting firms...
He takes the best from us all.
He uses genuine professional methods.
He really puts on the pressure to professionalize the network.
The issue of employment is also constantly changing.
And that fertilizes his system.
Which is why, at the present time,
he can boast 30 million euros in consolidated business.
This is huge for such a system.
With this demographic in trouble,
these thousands of people looking for a job,
where do they go to work? In businesses.
We must develop strong ties with these companies.
These companies aren't going to come and spontaneously hire people
from our teams, because they have a negative image
of people in rehabilitation. It is up to us to prove
That the people here take pride,
work a full day, are competent
and are fully able, some day, to work in their organizations or companies.
The second way of helping
is to recruit people
who have gone through this process of rehabilitation
in the Jardins
and stabilize them in their job, in our company.
For instance,
we have some people whom we have trained,
in jobs like landscape maintenance, and they can now be hired
to work in the green areas along the highways
or in similar jobs in the company.
We are currently working on connecting different worlds
that did not used to be connected.
There were the people who did social work on the one hand,
and those who did business on the other,
with a Chinese wall between the two.
Today we realize that in order to do social work,
you need skills,
capital, management methods
just like large corporations have.
And in large corporations, people are beginning to realize
that in order to keep the company running, to keep doing business and making profit,
you need to come back to some fundamental intuitions,
to human aspects, to personal involvement,
to doing things for free,
totally unthinkable just 10 years ago.
You need to explain to me.
Where are we here? And what are we doing?
What is happening here in the fields on the plateau de Saclay ?
This entire territory is earmarked to become
the European Silicon Valley,
the greatest concentration of businesses,
in research and development in Europe.
The French "grandes écoles" are already here...
Like Polytechnique, HEC...
The CEA, Danone, many companies are already established here
and many more are going to join them.
These are people who think. They are preparing the future.
In order to prepare the future,
they are essentially focusing on technological research.
Our modest presence
simply aims to show that the future
is also made up of social bonds and ecology.
A meeting happened with these Benedictine sisters
who hadn't worked this farm in 10 yeaers,
and yet they did not wish for just any project
to take root here.
We had an expectation, he had a project.
We came together because of human values,
namely giving people a place where they could live,
that would be full of life, Life with a capital L.
This is a cloistered Benedictine community.
This is an enclosure. Very physical.
There is a barrier and normally, nobody
is allowed to enter the enclosure, it is locked off.
Jean-Guy, it's as if he had jumped over the barrier.
He was immediately accepted
by the community. That's him all over.
He has that quality.
We started out with Mr. Jean-Guy Henckel,
who came to ask us for over 12 acres of land.
Out of the 12 acres, M. Henckel wanted them all.
44 acres in conventional agriculture isn't much.
Today we have farms
with several hundreds of acres all over the country.
As for market gardening,
working 44 acres with 2 or 3 types of produce
isn't exceptional.
But working 44 acres
and on these 44 acres growing 70 different vegetables,
in the summer and the winter, to have vegetables 50 weeks a year,
and place 4 or 5 of these
into 600 baskets for our customer-members
in the Île-de-France region,
now that is an exceptional achievement
for which no-one knows the method.
This place will also become a research and development platform
for the Jardins de Cocagne
who need to develop production.
The Vauhallan project
is a real game-changer for the organization,
operationally speaking:
learning to produce
natural, organic agriculture
on a large scale. In France, this is very new.
It is really a pilot.
Next,
since the network has a very tiny office in Paris,
this project will enable them to have a real center
from which they will really
be able to manage and develop the network,
build it up, implement new practices,
and build up a national training center
where over 200 people will be able to attend training sessions.
This is essential.
The project, seen from the professional standpoint,
is credible because they've already done it,
it is reliable, very well structured,
well described, and has been assessed by independent firms.
The only thing that is missing is the cash,
and he needs to be secured financially.
Everyone come out of this story a bit better,
that's what happens,
as a human being, on your own path.
What this is, is the flow of life.
There is a quote by Edgar Morin on that subject:
"The worst is unfortunately probable,
"but the best is still always possible."
Jean-Guy Henckel, you are a "Humble Hero".
- It is an honor to know you. - Thank you.
This was the easiest part.
*"You need vegetables. They need work.
"Together, let's grow solidarity!" Jean-Guy Henckel*
It's true that I was better
at harvesting than at sowing.
She is super !
Oh yes.
- Did he charm you, Sisters? - Yes, he did. That he did.
Yes, he charmed us.
Ok, the chores need doing.
Go ahead!
And the microphones.
- We were going to leave with the mics. - You can. We're good. Go ahead.
My best slip of the tongue was really saying “solitaire” instead of "solidaire".
Now that's extraordinary.
Subtitles: Eclair Group