Who said volunteering was in crisis? Adrien Richard, 32, launched at the end of 2020 on the Jeveuxaider.gouv.fr platform. “I had been thinking about it for a long time, but I had the vision of associations that were not very organized, with volunteers who had to manage and sacrifice themselves”, he says. In these times of health crisis, when there was a lot of talk about isolated elderly people, he chose the Claude Pompidou Foundation, and regularly visits an old lady suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Katia Pereira Dos Santos, 45, already a volunteer with an association for the maintenance of peasant agriculture, has been involved in parallel, since June, in the creation of a “associative café and third place” called La Fabrique, in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine).
They are among the volunteers, often students or working people, who have joined associations in large numbers since the start of the health crisis linked to Covid-19. Arrivals that were not enough to compensate for the departures of older and strongly involved people. The number of volunteers working within an association in France has thus fallen by 15% in two years: it has fallen from 13 million to 11 million, i.e. one fifth of the adult population, according to an IFOP-France Bénévolat survey carried out in January. “Direct” volunteering, outside of any structure, has progressed.
The decline was particularly marked in cultural associations. “The sector has been closed for a long time. Some volunteers were disgusted to hear that culture was not essential, not to mention the “stop and go” which made management more complex and burdened finances”, analyzes the president of the Coordination of federations and associations of culture and communication, Marie-Claire Martel. Civil security is also struggling: “During the Covid, we had to over-solicit volunteers and we were unable to train new recruits, which takes time. This sector requires greater availability than others”explains the President of the Order of Malta France, Cédric Chalret du Rieu.
“Need to listen to volunteers”
Conversely, certain themes mobilize more and more people. President of the network of student associations Animafac, Christophe Gaydier observes “many creations in the protection of the environment, in the fight against discrimination and against student precariousness”. The associations helping the excluded, where a large part of the volunteers work, have, for their part, limited the losses, and even increased their numbers.
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