I am the president and co-founder of "Musique pour tous"
("Music for All"). "Musique pour tous" is a project that I set up in the neighbourhood with my best friend when I was 16. Ultimately, my best friend and I are musicians and we had some great times together in our music studio. So to tell the truth, it's a friend's studio, so we had a rock band together and we had a lot of great times together and music was really what allowed us to develop to the full, I think, alongside school. Ultimately, high school was really interesting, but what we enjoyed most was getting together at the weekend to play music together. So the composition, creativity, sharing aspect of music, was what was really most important for us and we said to ourselves that when it came to it, what had enriched our lives ought to be shared and passed on to as many people as possible. And so that is how Musique pour tous arose: in the end, it is providing access to music for children who do not have the
resources and boosting their self-esteem precisely through music and this whole ability, everything that music develops in a person. So we set it up when we were 16. We didn't know initially that we were ultimately social entrepreneurs and so we were spotted by Ashoka, we entered their (...) competition and in 2012 and won, which finally made us budding social entrepreneurs. And Ashoka has done more than that, that is to say, we're not just musicians but committed musicians because from then on we were social entrepreneurs, and so a new vocation, you know. In fact, we said to ourselves that this experience that we had, because what's important too is that at the age of 16 we wanted experience, for us to be able to remember later what people had shown us at the age of 16, we wanted to enable our friends to join us during the last two years of high school and during the last year, we invited a dozen or so friends to join us and so in the end, by the end of high school
there were 10-12 of us. And it was really great, we had some great times. We set up two workshops in Issy-les-Moulineaux, near to where we lived, and by the end of high school, we all envisaged a problem, namely that nobody in the association wanted to quit their studies, it was very important that we gained this experience
on the side. Meeting up for this project that we all love, but pursuing our university courses at the same time, because we felt the need to get a degree, the need to potentially open doors. And so we launched an appeal on Facebook to find an executive officer, somebody who would be able to take over the project during our respective degree courses. So I enrolled in preparatory classes and am now in the second year preparing for a French business school. Quentin, my friend and co-founder, is in his second year of preparatory classes in maths and
engineering. And then our other friends went into medicine. So there you go, we found this person, called Arnaud Chevel-- so he's also called Arnaud-- who's a little bit older than us, he's 26, and he decided to take the Musique pour tous project on for us over the years when we are in preparatory classes,
and develop it. So there you go, in three years, "Musique pour tous", it used to be 2 local workshops in Issy-les-Moulineaux, and nowadays it's more than six throughout the Greater Paris region, so well, the project is still going and it's fantastic. Musique pour tous is an association that encourages social integration among young people through music, we make music, a vehicle for social integration, and we organise fun, community workshops that are free of charge for those benefiting from them, children, and we pass on our passion for music, hoping that this will boost their self-esteem.