December 2025
The Fondation Altitudes Turns One
One year of exploration and learning. One year spent listening, understanding better, adding nuance, and questioning ourselves. One year sketching our path forward—despite headwinds—and choosing, still, optimism and determination.
Social Innovation
Philanthropy
Future of Education
We can remain optimistic when we see the quality of social entrepreneurs and their teams, who are innovating in the field of education. Yes, associations are remarkable laboratories of social innovation for the French Ministry of Education.
New tools, methods, and processes are emerging through them to better engage our young people, reduce educational inequalities, and strengthen well-being and cohesion in schools.
We can also stay optimistic when we observe the many promising, talented initiatives developed and implemented by teachers. At the local level, the public education system is vibrant, inventive, constantly moving—too often out of sight.
And we remain determined. Associations and the broader ecosystem need partners who stand beside them—not only financially, but also to support their structural needs: strategy, digital transformation, AI, organizational design, and human resources.
The ingredients are there, but far more is needed to turn around a fragile situation.
We all know the indicators and the various reports. They paint a clear picture: delicate, complex, fragile.
How do we create national-scale change?
How do we move from local experimentation to national adoption?
How do we prevent 80,000 young people from dropping out of school every year?
How do we avoid the situation in which 73% of schools begin the year with at least one unfilled teaching position?
How do we better guide young people in their educational and vocational pathways—especially in professional tracks?
How do we fully leverage the AI revolution to open education to multiple intelligences, break down silos in learning, improve teacher training, and embrace differentiated and adaptive pedagogy?
How do we better anticipate learning gaps early on, starting in first grade, and better support the most vulnerable students?
We cannot claim to have all the answers to these fundamental questions. And it is not ready-made answers we need, but shared solutions patiently built together.
Yet we do hold a few convictions.
The Altitudes Foundation is a catalyst for conversations, communication, and collective action.
The world of education is a world of small steps and long timeframes—requiring persistence and significant funding, both philanthropic and public.
We must therefore act together, not only talk together. We need to go further. To cross a meaningful threshold beyond silos of expertise and advocacy.
How? By working on transversal issues and implementing them in local territories. By jointly demonstrating concepts. By producing tangible results. This requires project management and coordination—work that philanthropists must be willing to fund. Funding the structural, not only the expected outcome. The invisible more than the immediately visible “results” to showcase in a report.
This is what we have understood, and where the Altitudes Foundation will increasingly operate. Where we will be increasingly demanding of ourselves, of our partners, and of our choices.
Through building coalitions of action around essential areas of educational transformation.
This logic of collective action—together with the Ministry of Education, inside and outside the classroom—should enable the demonstration of practices that, tomorrow, can become public education policies.
This is the essence of our strategy, structured around three pillars:
- A vertical pillar: supporting innovative associations in their core areas of expertise.
- A horizontal pillar: building shared resources and coalitions useful to all (tech, HR, marketing, AI, pedagogy…).
- A grounded advocacy pillar: rooted in local realities, speaking a common language shaped by frontline actors, and helping build a shared vision for the future of education.
More than ever, the moment requires coordinated energy and commitment from philanthropies and associations, in close partnership with the French Ministry of Education.
As we move forward, isn’t this already the outline of tomorrow’s education?
An education more open, beyond classroom walls; one strengthened by external partnerships and bridges between schools, the private sector, and associations—so we can tackle the immense challenges of our time: social, environmental, and above all, the challenge of youth employability.
There will be no industrial renewal in France without deep reflection on the skills required for the jobs of tomorrow—reflection that must underpin national economic policy. When a young person cannot envision a professional future, their participation in collective and democratic life inevitably weakens.
Onward to year two.
It will bring surprises, joys, shared challenges, and new learnings.
We enter this second year convinced that French companies and entrepreneurs have an essential role to play for our youth—alongside public institutions and associations.
We enter this second year convinced that French companies and entrepreneurs have an essential role to play for our youth—alongside public institutions and associations.
Fondation Altitudes is under the aegis
of Fondation Caritas France
of Fondation Caritas France