What is Pour Nos Aînés? - Anna H. Pour Nos Aînés is a club that was recently created at school to help old people in nursing homes during the confinement. It is an initiative that aims to share music and concerts by students to the elderly. It has since expanded to other projects to help nursing homes. It was started as a response to the impossibility to do inperson concerts as some students from the school used to do. For all of you who are interested in knowing more about this club, its founder, Tamara B., has accepted to help explain what this club really is.
What is your club’s mission? Pour Nos Aînés' mission is to bring more joy into the lives of the elderly and put a smile on their faces especially during these difficult times of COVID-19 where it was impossible and now very difficult to see their family or friends.
How was it created? Before the confinement, I performed in EHPADs for the residents in concerts organised by the amazing Pascale Blachez, a mother at EJM. When the pandemic hit, we couldn’t see them anymore and I thought that it must be very difficult for them. I contacted Pascale and asked if I could help and she was thinking about collecting videos and then making a “Confinement Concert” for the elderly to continue the project. I thought that it might be helpful to have one place to put everything for the elderly on, and so created the website pournosaines.com. From there, Pascale sent me her fantastic compilations, in which both I and her feature, performing with our families, and we made a form where people could send videos (giving their “droit à l’image”). We were thrilled at how many people
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replied and sent us wonderful contributions and would like to give a huge THANK YOU to all those people. We received videos from our school EJM, the very musical school l’Ecole Alsacienne, the choir Sotto Voce that I was a part of and many other places, amounting to over 100 videos! We spread the project from music, which is a core aspect of Pour Nos Aînés', to also collecting letters, poems, drawings, photos and messages as well. We contacted EHPAD companies, and managed to reach the head of communications at Korian, a company with 800 EHPADs. It is thanks to her and Pascale’s tireless calling of EHPADs personally that the link of the website was shared all over France and we reached EHPADs in Normandy, Clermont-Ferrand, Bretagne, Marseille, the South of France and countless other places. I was given the opportunity to present this initiative by Madame Laure Zéboulon which featured in the EJM video sent to the school at the end of the year, and also performed the song “Y a de la joie” that I sang for the elderly, changing the lyrics for them. There is so much that can be done for the elderly and so this year, I created the club Pour Nos Aînés at school where we all work on helping the elderly together, be-
cause teamwork makes the dream work! We made the Operation Saint Valentin where our Team held a rose bake sale- selling roses we had bought from the great fleuriste Boule de Neige next to school who gave our Team a formation on how to package them, giving us behind the scenes experience and sharing his craft with us. We sold them all, and using all of the profit,
we bought another batch of roses which we packaged them and put the names of each resident and brought it to the EHPAD de l’Orme in person along with personalised messages of support and encour-
