French Companies Are Inviting Homeless People to Sleep in Their Offices

For several years, when Pierre-Yves Loaëc left his office in Nantes in the evenings, he passed a woman sleeping rough in the parking lot near Nobilito, the marketing agency he runs. The contrast nagged at him. Outside, she huddled near a parking garage vent for warmth during the winter. “My office had heat, a kitchen, sofas, a shower, toilets, but was sitting empty all night,” he recalls. Yet he never spoke to her, unsure how he could help.

Instead, Loaëc became interested in a broader question: Why were so many offices sitting empty every night while thousands of people lacked a safe place to sleep? The answer became Bureaux du Coeur (“Offices of the Heart”), a nonprofit that turns unused office space into temporary overnight accommodation for people experiencing homelessness.

Bureaux du Coeur has helped more than 1,000 people and provided roughly 160,000 nights of shelter. Credit: Béatrice Prève

Today, the initiative works with 400 companies in 40 cities across France, and beyond, in Lisbon, Barcelona and Brussels. Since its founding in 2019, Bureaux du Coeur has helped more than 1,000 people and provided roughly 160,000 nights of shelter. Its ambition is even larger: to expand across Europe as cities grapple with two parallel crises, a persistent rise in homelessness and a glut of underused office space following the shift to remote and hybrid work.

Bureaux de Coeur’s solution remains remarkably simple: When employees go home, offices become homes.

Loaëc did not arrive at the concept alone. He is president of the Nantes chapter of the Centre des Jeunes Dirigeants (CJD), a longstanding French business leaders’ movement founded on the principle that economic activity should serve society. “I always imagined the solution collectively,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t do it alone.”

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When he first presented the idea to around 15 fellow business leaders, “many people thought I had lost my mind,” Loaëc says with a laugh. Some immediately listed potential problems, security concerns, insurance issues, liability risks, property damage. Others focused on the practical question that would ultimately define the initiative: How could it actually work?

The group developed a model that companies could realistically adopt. To qualify for Bureaux du Coeur, candidates must meet strict criteria: They must be adults, without children or pets, reside legally in France, use neither alcohol nor drugs, and not suffer from severe physical or mental health issues. Also, every candidate must participate in accompanying measures to help them reintegrate into a job or vocational training.

Naturally, these criteria exclude a large number of those in need. “We can’t accommodate everybody,” Loaëc acknowledges, noting that roughly 350,000 people are homeless in France. That limitation disappointed him at first, but he says participating companies are not equipped to provide medical treatment, addiction support or intensive social care. Their role is to offer space while partner organizations select participants and provide professional support.

Each company takes only one guest at a time. The “guests,” as Loaëc insists on calling them, sleep in meeting rooms, break areas, or spaces that are temporarily converted into bedrooms each evening.

“You can’t keep a job if you don’t have a roof over your head,” Loaëc says. “The mental burden becomes enormous.” Credit: Monsieur Roni

The first host was Loaëc himself. In 2019, he welcomed Elisabeth, a woman fleeing domestic violence who had been sleeping in her car despite holding a job. She stayed in his office for three weeks while securing longer-term housing.

A second guest, known as Booba, stayed during the Covid-19 pandemic, practically alone in the building throughout the country’s first lockdown. At the time, emergency shelters were among the most significant clusters of coronavirus transmission in Nantes. “Knowing he was safe in the agency and away from that risk was important,” Loaëc says.

The breakthrough came in May 2020, when France’s largest regional newspaper, Ouest-France, published a story about the initiative. Companies and social-service organizations from across the country began calling. “The response was completely crazy,” Loaëc remembers.

What had started as a local experiment became a national movement. The initiative now employs 12 staff members and coordinates approximately 270 volunteers nationwide. Funding comes from foundations and private donations.

Participants consistently describe the experience as life-changing. Samy, a Sudanese trainee electrician, struggled to find stable accommodation while pursuing vocational training. “I feel a little bit at home here,” he said during his stay. “I feel a little freer.”

The comments reveal a reality that social workers know well: Homelessness is not only a lack of shelter. “People spend their days wondering where they will sleep, whether they will be safe, where they can shower, charge a phone, store their belongings or simply rest,” Loaëc says. “You can’t keep a job if you don’t have a roof over your head. The mental burden becomes enormous.”

The apparent simplicity of Bureaux du Coeur masks a carefully structured system. Every placement involves three parties: the host company, the guest and a partner social-service organization, which selects the participants.

All parties sign a formal agreement. Guests commit to searching for long-term housing and employment opportunities. Social service partners provide guidance and monitoring. Companies provide accommodation. Once a month, everyone involved meets to review progress.

One of the initiative’s less obvious effects is its ability to challenge assumptions. Loaëc admits he used to carry many common stereotypes. “A homeless person is not necessarily someone who begs, doesn’t wash and drinks a lot of alcohol,” he realized. What surprised him most was the number of working people struggling with housing insecurity. Others are apprentices, students, refugees or people recovering from sudden crises such as domestic violence. Their biggest obstacle is often not unemployment but the lack of a stable place from which to rebuild.

One former guest, Souleymane Diarra, emphasized the emotional significance of being welcomed into a workplace. “Here, people don’t judge me for the hardships I’ve been through,” he said. “People here lift me up. It encourages me to move forward.”

That sense of belonging extends beyond the guests themselves. They are not expected to pack up before the employees arrive every morning. On the contrary, Loaëc hopes they will share a coffee and a conversation.

Alain, a formerly homeless man hosted by Bureaux du Cœur at the company Haxoneo in northern France, describes how depression led to the collapse of his life. He lost his job, home, car, partner and child. During the time he was homeless, he says he was largely ignored or treated with hostility: “For two years, people either shouted at me, ‘Get out of here,’ or a police officer would shine a flashlight into my eyes and say, ‘Do you think that guy is dead?’”

The employees at Haxoneo and Bureaux du Coeur were the first people who actually had conversations with him. What transformed his situation was not only a safe place to sleep but ordinary human interaction, being spoken to as a person and regaining confidence. During his stay he found employment and began preparing for independent housing.

“Having a coffee with him sounds trivial, but for him, who had coffee with him over the last two years?” a Haxoneo employee reflects. “What’s great is that beyond making our offices available, it created this social bond.”

For companies, Loaëc believes Bureaux du Coeur strengthens social cohesion at a time when remote work and flexible schedules have weakened many workplace relationships. “What we promise companies is an experience of community,” he says. Hosting a guest, he argues, often does “much more than bungee jumping and other [traditional corporate] team-building events” to unite employees.

According to an impact study commissioned by the organization, between 85 and 90 percent of participants leave the program with both housing and employment after an average stay of four and a half months.

Guests usually stay for a maximum of three to six months. Credit: Béatrice Prève

Loaëc is careful not to claim credit for achievements that belong to partner organizations. Yet housing stability appears to be the missing piece that allows other interventions to succeed. “It’s a transition solution,” Loaëc says. “Our role is simply to put a roof over someone’s head so the rest becomes possible.”

The model is also comparatively inexpensive. According to figures provided by the organization, a place in a traditional emergency shelter costs public authorities roughly €10,000 per year. A place through Bureaux du Coeur costs less than €2,000 because the infrastructure already exists and much of the support network relies on volunteers.

Things can go wrong. One guest became isolated and stopped receiving adequate support, eventually leaving the accommodation in poor condition. Another drove away with a company vehicle. Yet such incidents remain rare. Among more than 1,000 guests, Loaëc estimates only four or five placements have resulted in serious problems. The common factor in those cases, he says, is that host companies ignored established guidelines.

Insurance companies have adapted to support the model. Firms such as AXA have modified commercial policies to allow businesses to host people overnight in office buildings, removing what was initially a significant obstacle.

The guests usually stay for a maximum of three to six months, but Loaëc’s company just accommodated a guest for 18 months, until the young man could enroll in a job training. “I’m the boss, I can break the rules,” Loaëc says with a laugh.

Despite its rapid growth, Loaëc insists there is nothing revolutionary about the concept. He sees it as reviving an older tradition of hospitality that modern society has forgotten. For centuries, farms, workshops and family businesses routinely provided temporary shelter to workers, travelers and people in need.

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Modern offices simply became detached from that tradition.

The woman who first inspired the project still sleeps outside. Loaëc still sees her sometimes.

But the question she forced him to confront has now produced a network that has sheltered more than a thousand people and provided hundreds of thousands of nights of safety.

Every evening, across France, office lights switch off and employees head home. And in hundreds of buildings, someone else arrives carrying a key.

The post French Companies Are Inviting Homeless People to Sleep in Their Offices appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.