English - Our Federation

''La Fédération Nationale des Maisons Des Potes'' (www.maisondespotes.fr) is a French organisation fighting against racism and discrimination. It does federate actors from associations, elected representatives, union activists engaged in working class districts along with immigrants and their children to defend their rights to employement, culture, education, housing, security, justice and secularism.

The Federation was set up in 1989 by Sos Racisme to act as closely as possible to the residents of the popular neighbourhoods in order to implement action to struggle against social exclusion, racism and discrimination.

The successive presidents at the head of the ''Fédération des Maisons Des Potes'' are: Harlem Désir, Eric Montes, Malik Boutih, Shérézade Ouarem, Fadela Amara, Abdou Chaoui, Samuel Thomas.

We presently operate in a hundred cities of France with 30 departmental structures. This network coordinates 4000 members of the organization, individual members ( activist worker, local politician, syndicalist etc.) that work with us around our ten proposals to make equality a reality, and the 300 neighbourhood organisations which participate in our actions and our ''Tour de France de l'Egalité''.

– ''Les Tours de France de l'Egalité'' are useful to coordinate our organisation network and to mobilize our antiracist militants.
– Since 2010, we have organised national meetings and citizen universities. Our organisation aim to improve the convergence between our associative forces with trade union forces, human rights organization forces, political parties, federation of school organisations.
– We pursue actions of lobbying targeted at parliament speaker, MPs, ministers.
– We publish a quarterly magazine called ''Pote à Pote'' ( 9000 subscribers, published on internet for 250 000 sympathizers). It is an educational tool to give reflexions, reference points, tools for popular education.
– We conduct legal actions against discrimination to ensure that racial discriminations are punished in the area of employment, housing, health and culture...
– We take preventive actions and actions against discrimination in the young adult access to the buisness world. For this, we have a device called: SOS Stage (www.sos-stage.fr) devoted to high school students in professional high school. For this action, we work in partnership with high school, with small or big companies to help young adults who '' violently want to be trained and to work''.
– We want to developp action of convergence in the antiracist struggle and for equality at an european level. We want to developp strengthening links with european organizations from Italia, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Bulgaria... This perspective was reached in October 2012, 5 european organizations attended our seminary and explained us what is the situation of immigrants in their countries. We want to continue in this way and developp more our european network.