Allowing young people to reveal their potential through arts

Published on 07/21/2025

In France today, young people do not have equal access to practicing arts. Drawing, writing, taking part in a theater play and playing an instrument are as many ways of gaining independence and confidence, developing competencies useful to professional inclusion, and being instrumental in a collective project that contributes to social ties. That’s why TotalEnergies Foundation supports programs for practicing arts that develop young people’s soft skills and personal initiative.

TotalEnergies Foundation considers culture as an essential mainstay in social cohesion and dialogue and focuses specific attention on educational arts and culture programs that invite and encourage young people to actively participate and co-create. Throughout France, the Foundation prioritizes programs that are led by artists and are sustainable projects.

In 2025, TotalEnergies Foundation supported around fifteen partners and artistic and cultural education programs aimed at young people aged 12 to 25 years. Here are a few examples.

Since the beginning of the 2024 academic year, TotalEnergies Foundation has been partner of the Sauvegarde de l’art français foundation and the program entitled Les lycéens à la découverte du plus grand musée de France (High-school students discover the biggest museum in France). The program targets young high school students in rural or priority education areas. TotalEnergies Foundation’s support has enabled the project to be deployed among 400 new students. In 2024, four classes from the Ardennes, the Côte d’Or, the Creuse and Eure-et-Loir departments were involved.
Winners of the 2024 call for partners, the Labo des histoires (Story Lab) aims to let young people, teenagers and young adults have their say, give them an opportunity to express themselves and share their feelings and ideas, and become more self-confident in the process. Thanks to the support from TotalEnergies Foundation, the association can organize cycles of long-term writing workshops involving 1,500 young people and adults from across the board in a particular social grouping throughout France: young offenders, those who are hospitalized, have dropped out of school, refugees, etc.
When it comes to music, Les Concerts de la Loge orchestra has been a partner of the Foundation since 2023. Through its Hip Baroque Choc project, it involves young people from vocational high schools in the Île-de-France and Hauts-de-France region in a creation that combines baroque music, hip hop dance, speeches, applied arts, percussions, choir singing and theater. A true encounter between the very different social and arts worlds, the Hip Baroque Choc project enables young people who have little access to culture to reveal their potential and strengthen their ambitions.
The Foundation also supports practical arts workshops, from the Alhambra Cinémarseille, the Concerts de poche, the Festival d’Aix, Jazz in Marciac, the Source Garouste, the Paris National Opera, the Philharmonie de Paris and also Fusion Jeunesse, DEFI Production and Femmes & cinéma.

TotalEnergies Foundation has decided to support arts programs because the act of creating enables young people to discover new cultures, reach out to others, create relationships, assert themselves, learn how to listen to others, and be audacious and proud especially on the occasion of public presentations that are organized at the end of the year.