Demain en Main: Working Towards a Sustainable Way of Life
Demain en Main, a Brussels-based foundation active in pursuits of sustainable ways of life, will hold a festival in three eco-friendly places in Brussels this Sunday.
Officially founded a year ago by three members: Charlotte, Estelle and Méline, Demain en Main started their venture by organising workshops to teach people how to be more autonomous and how to have an eco-friendly and healthy way of living.
They have since expanded and in anticipation of the upcoming festival, Brussels Express spoke with founding member Charlotte to gain insight into the development of the organisation.
Could you tell us about the first year of the organisation?
We officially launched Demain en Main in February 2017, but we had already been working on our common projects for about a year. From the beginning, the main point of our foundation was to help people to try new daily habits, as well as to use home-made products; we set up regular events and workshops. In the beginning, we were only hosted by La Tricoterie (Saint-Gilles), but we have since built partnerships with other stakeholders such as La Contrebande and Le Stock in Fernand Cocq.
We have been getting better and better over the past few months: communication is improving, the community of people are more committed, and there are more and more people who visit our workshops. We have also had the chance to be selected by CoopCity, which trains stakeholders who are active in the social and circular economy. This requires quite a lot of work, but it definitely makes our project more professional.
What’s the aim of the upcoming festival on Sunday?
The festival is to help with broadcast the goal of our company: zero waste, sustainable food, home-made products. Over the last few months, we have been thinking about new ways of working. We first thought about implementing one-day projects, instead of holding two-hour workshops every two or three weeks; we have also worked on involving other stakeholders as well as exploring new working places;
The Sunday festival links those two aims. We have managed to co-organise the event together with Boentje Café, which is a 0-waste café, and Entre Nous, an eco-friendly restaurant; Tricoterie also remains a partner.
The idea is about accompanying and planning sustainable and green events. We are also working on similar projects, but we’ll first see how it goes on Sunday.
What are your future goals?
We’re very keen to keep on developing our activities. We aim to make our community bigger, as well as to try to convince more and more people to adopt sustainable ways of living. This is the conceptual approach we take.
