Charity Week 2019: The Paris Team Takes On Community Farming

On Thursday sixty people from our Paris-based team headed out to La Prairie du Canal — an urban farm northeast of Paris run by the French environmental nonprofit La Sauge

This day of urban farming was part of Contentsquare’s first-ever week of giving back — a global set of events that saw different teams volunteering for their chosen charity. 

After a day of getting their hands dirty for a good cause, the team spent the evening playing mölkky (yep — we had to look that up too), pétanque (the French version of the lawn game bocce) and perfecting the art of the apéritif. 

We caught up with Fanny Pourcenoux, our Head of UX/UI Design who helped organize the Paris Charity Week outing, to find out whether our French colleagues really do have a green thumb.

 


Give us a bit of background on Charity Week.

Fanny: Our various culture crews had been wanting to work on a global project for quite some time. We explored several ideas but everyone agreed that to schedule a week in which each office could volunteer for a group and give back to the community would be a great initiative.

Why did you choose to volunteer for La Sauge, in particular?

Fanny: There are so many great organizations out there to choose from. We worked on this project with Wenabi, a group that pairs companies with nonprofits, and helps facilitate these sort of team-wide volunteer initiatives. They were the ones who suggested we partner with La Sauge and spend a day helping out on the farm. It’s interesting to see that our friends in New York also went with an organization with a mission around sustainability — raising environmental awareness has been a big focus at Contentsquare recently.

 

So what happens when 60 Contentsquare team members spend a half-day on a farm?

Fanny: We worked hard! We did some gardening, of course, but we also learned how to make eco-friendly, plant-based products like shampoo and deodorant. All in all we planted more than 80 bean plants, learned about mushroom farming, prepared a plot of land for new crops, constructed 6 planters, and made over 40 of our own, completely sustainable cosmetics. But as well as improving our gardening and building skills, we also learned a lot about how to reduce our ecological footprint and make better everyday decisions as consumers.

 

Any other highlights?

Fanny: The team had a great time, and no summer Contentsquare outing is complete without an evening pétanque tournament (at least not in France!). We do a lot of team building activities in this company, and it was really nice to change the focus and work together on something completely unrelated to analytics while helping raise awareness about such a terrific organization and cause.