Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Offices of the Heart: Companies Invite the Unhoused to Stay in Their Buildings at Night

For years, Pierre-Yves Loaëc walked past a woman sleeping near a parking garage vent each night, knowing his office sat empty a few steps away — warm, equipped, unused. That quiet discomfort became Bureaux du Coeur (“Offices of the Heart”), a French nonprofit that has now provided more than 160,000 nights of shelter by matching people experiencing homelessness with companies willing to open their doors after hours. The model is structurally simple but socially profound: guests don’t disappear before employees arrive each morning, and something as ordinary as sharing a morning coffee carries weight that is hard to overstate. “Having a coffee with him sounds trivial,” one employee reflects, “but for him — who had coffee with him over the last two years?” What the initiative quietly demonstrates is that the distance between someone with nowhere to sleep and someone with an empty building is often less a matter of resources than of imagination — and the willingness to ask a different question.

Be The Change

Think of someone in your life — a neighbor, a coworker, a familiar stranger you pass regularly — whom you’ve noticed but never truly seen, someone you’ve kept at a comfortable distance. Today, close that distance by one small degree: say hello, ask their name, or simply make eye contact and wish them well.