Eco-volunteer: Unis-Cité mobilizes to promote eco-civic action

Reducing the consumption of water, improving thermal insulation, sorting wastes, food consumption privileging seasonal produce: while the main actions in favor of environmental conservation that every person can undertake in his everyday life are fairly well known today, there's still a long way to go before more and more families put their shoulder to the wheel. For the poorest of them, in particular, these matters are very often difficult to handle for many reasons: obsolescence of badly insulated apartments, no access to source-separation systems, ancient sanitary facilities causing incessant water leakage, etc. and all of this in a context in which the adults primarily focus their energies on economic issues.

Unis-Cité, a nonprofit which since 1995 has been organizing civic service for young unpaid volunteers aged 18 to 25 in many areas of general interest, has decided to launch a wide ranging program to tackle this fundamental challenge: to help the public at large to change its habits. Starting in October 2009, "Éco-volontaire" will therefore be sending youths engaged in civil service to families in economic difficulty, to help them adopt new living standards based on environmental and social concerns alike.

In the first program year, 550 families will be accompanied by 124 eco-volunteers in the Paris region, the North, in Bordeaux, Nantes and Rheims. The youths will be involved directly with the families: acquisition of new reflexes to reduce energy consumption in all the rooms, saving water, better management of waste source separation, purchases of fresh and seasonal produce, etc. They will also be responsible for organizing communication in the neighborhoods, training the families, making assessments during the program and organizing educational outings.

In the Paris region, Veolia Environnement has mobilized to support this program.
For example, the Veolia Environnement campus will be released to train the young eco-volunteers at the beginning of their assignments (four-day sessions) and experts will then stand alongside to answer any questions they ask. And the grant from the Veolia Environnement Foundation will be used to promote activities developed more particularly with the families of Villiers-le-Bel and Champigny-sur-Marne. This means sixty-four families followed up by sixteen eco-volunteers. After the experimental phase, stretching from October 2009 to June 2010, the program is slated for extension: from October 2010, two thousand families will be benefiting from the advice of a thousand eco-volunteers.