On her bedside table: For a pirate ecology, by Fatima Ouassak (La Découverte, 198 pages, 17 euros), and Talent is a fiction, by Samah Karaki (JC Lattès, 306 pages, 20 euros). Best show ever? Peaky Blinders, a dive into the underbelly of England in the 1920s. Its inspirations? Christiane Taubira, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. Achraf Manar admits: “I work on this day and night. » This “engine”, this “flame”, as he calls it, is the fight against social inequalities.
At 25, the young man has just founded, with eight other young people, the Linked Destiny movement, of which he is president. The association, which aims to be intergenerational, demands social justice for young people from working-class neighborhoods, whether they are immigrants or not. Achraf makes no difference: “All of them suffered from the situation of their parents, affected by their dignity, whether by discrimination or by devalued jobs. » He adds young people from rural areas whose experiences are similar. Lack of jobs, examples, networks, codes, information… All have in common “feeling excluded”, he explains.
To support them, Destiny Linkes advocates a policy of small steps. The collective decided to focus primarily on student insecurity, a subject that concerns young people and their parents. Its members began going door-to-door in the CROUS to collect feedback from students and set themselves a first objective: to obtain that the student grant be paid over twelve months and not over ten, as is the case. Currently.
This mode of action is directly inspired by community organizing, a model of collective organization in which local communities bring forward their demands themselves. Very popular in the United States, the practice enjoyed some success in France in the years 2000-2010. “The enthusiasm for community organizing was particularly strong after the victory of Barack Obama, the most famous community organizer,” recalls Julien Talpin, political science researcher at the CNRS. Today, we practice it more loosely: we only retain certain precepts, for example the idea of achieving small victories here and now. »
“Weigh in the public debate”
Its horizontal dimension – there is no leader – and its pragmatism – obtaining rapid and concrete changes – break, in any case, with the traditional methods of the associative world. “At Destiny Links, we would like people to feel like they are actors, to make them understand that we can change things if we organize ourselves. That involves training them, giving them resources. Our objective is to unite generations in order to have influence in the public debate,” explains Achraf, who trained in community organizing by following a distance course at Harvard University between February and July.