Support for people on the street : our mode of action
The diversity of our actions carried out with people on the street responds both to the diversity of situations encountered and to what is possible to do locally. These actions are in addition to the responses provided by our associative partners or by the public authorities. To best respond to the distress of the very excluded people we meet, our teams in the field have deployed several modes of action :
Three benchmarks guide our actions:
The solidarity expressed by our teams of volunteers is civic, it corresponds to a desire for openness to others, in particular to the most disadvantaged, with the aim of building together a fraternal and just society. Our volunteer teams are professionals of the link and decline a range of relational modes:
- The personalized welcome in a friendly and collective setting, or in the street, through discussions and listening, gives full place to the person (informal relationship);
- Participatory activities allow personal and collective expression and reinvigorate each person;
- Individual support, over time if necessary, is a formal relationship with objectives shared between the support and the supported: access to rights, but also individual projects, with the involvement of partners if necessary. The accompanying volunteer works in a team.
Focus on day care centers
In small rural communities as well as in medium-sized towns and large urban areas, Secours Catholique has created places to offer a first reception and support the various requests of people on the street in order to facilitate their daily lives.
More than 70 day centers are open to them throughout France. In Paris, Avignon, or even Marseilles, these people find landmarks and a friendly welcome. It begins with listening, guidance, and sometimes extends to long-term support to help them access their rights: domiciliation, search for accommodation, procedures to benefit from social services ... At the same time, these receptions offer services (showers and dry cleaning), meals and various cultural, educational and sports workshops.
These receptions are often a landmark for people in a wandering situation. Even in the event of a temporary break in the relationship, the loyalty of the relationship is a principle. They facilitate meetings, personal relationships of trust. Day care centers are fertile ground for considering the always delicate transition from an informal relationship to a formal relationship, from a one-off relationship to a scheduled relationship, thought through over time. It then becomes possible to set out together.
Jean Rodhain day care center in Metz (57)
Located on the heights of Metz, in the city center, the Jean Rodhain day center is one of the 70 day centers of Secours Catholique in France. Created in 1984, it offers three poles :
It is a real living and sharing place and where you can meet many nationalities. The people we welcome all have in common: a difficult, precarious, even marginal, living situation. For breakfasts, many people show up after a night in a squat or in the street, in a car park, a cellar, a stairwell or a garage.
Day care activities have been heavily impacted by the confinements that punctuated 2020 and 2021. However, despite this context of exceptional health crisis, day care has not, at any time, ceased its actions with the most destitute. And this by reinventing the methods of reception and care.
In addition, still linked to the health crisis, we noted:
The collective workshops were largely impacted by a forced shutdown and then by an interruption of several months. To date, some collective workshops have resumed with the observation of a drop in attendance, but all the same with the desire to continue to move forward together, to meet and recreate links. The isolation that has impacted us all proves the essential nature of these living spaces and places of speech.
In 2020, 886 people were welcomed at the Jean Rodhain reception.
The emergence of a new day reception, where people from the street are actors
Since 1984, Secours Catholique has rented the premises in which it carries out its work at 9 rue de la Glacière in Metz. These premises are now dilapidated, unsuitable and too small. In addition, the owner of the property has decided to sell it. The day care center must therefore leave the premises before June 30, 2022 at the latest.
The Secours Catholique delegation wishes to take advantage of this imposed change of location, to offer a new welcome where all local partners (associations, public, private) can make their skills available.
The new project ?
Our future place of reception, the Maison des Solidarités, will be used to welcome people on the street, isolated people, men or women, often in great precariousness, migrants, newcomers, people seeking asylum or awaiting regularization, people with breach of rights following personal accidents ...
The place is intended to be an unconditional, benevolent, warm, family and human place of welcome above all intended for people who have suffered breaks in their lives, who are in pain, who have fallen into various addictions and who will find there, a place to settle down and to rebuild. A place of listening, rest, support, networking, guidance ...
Of course, it will be possible to find basic services such as showers, a laundry, a catering service (breakfast and lunch) but the people welcomed can also benefit from personalized support and participate in remobilization workshops. This involves welcoming 80 people per day on average.
The ambition is to be able to offer actions on atypical schedules also at the end of the afternoon and in the evening, on weekends as soon as the teams of volunteers can be formed. It will then be considered to respond to a long-identified need to offer meals on Saturday noon or Sunday noon. It may be possible to bring in groups made up of actors (different associations, different neighborhoods, different horizons) ready to enter into a partnership with Secours Catholique to organize meals. It will be possible to allow the solidarity engagement of new actors, working people willing to volunteer on time slots compatible with their job.
Finally, the welcome will be used by all the partners with which Secours Catholique has been working for several years in Metz : UDAF 57, CCAS, Médecins du Monde, AIEM, CMSEA, RESAM associations, etc. The objective is to allow associative partners to find such or such person accompanied either for consultation meetings, assemblies, conferences-debates. It is also planned to explore with the CCAS of the City of Metz the possibility of imagining a strengthened partnership.
An innovative project:
We are now looking for the premises that will allow us to set up this House of Solidarity in Metz. The location in the city center and the necessary surface area are important criteria which limit the possibilities. Moreover, the beliefs linked to the action of a day care center as well as the associated nuisances for the neighborhood make this research all the more difficult.
The very nature of this project prompted our Metz team to think about experimenting with a mediator position to carry out the missions of our day reception. This mediator is responsible for reaching out to people in the street in the neighborhood, reassuring residents, traders and residents about the presence of the public in the street and identifying people in precariousness to provide all assistance and all guidance needed. He will ensure the logistics to bring meals or packed lunches and food packages to any person reported in connection with the network of partners (isolated people, people sick with COVID 19 or others without support capacity).
For this unprecedented experiment and given the challenges linked to the successful implementation of this new day care center, the delegation wished to favor applications from people with experience of life in the street, to initiate a peer relationship. on a peer-to-peer basis with the people encountered.
The public authorities, very interested in this experiment, have agreed to finance this post of mediator for 12 months from 2022.
The operating expenses of the Jean Rodhain day care center in 2020 were 113,540 €:
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