SOCIAL ACTIVITIES
Our Activities
Currently, we work with five different housing centres that host asylum seekers and are operated by the Aurore Association. On average we organise one to two activities in each centre per week, i.e. 5-10 activities per week in total, all of which are planned by a rotating team of 3 to 6 volunteers.
These activities include museum visits (with or without guides); events organized by the city (Carnaval, Nuit Blanche, etc.); picnics; cooking, etc . In centres, we also organize film projections or seasonal activities like tree-decorating around Christmas time, a joint birthday party… We are currently expanding our amount of ‘festive’ activities: concerts or dances that provide to asylum seekers the kind of social experiences they are most often excluded from. The aim of these regular activities is to provide some sort of stability and regularity in asylum seekers’ daily lives, while discovering Paris and its culture, spending agreeable moments together, and challenging the aid provider/aid beneficiary dichotomy that so often characterises relations with asylum seekers in other contexts (material distributions, French classes…).
The ability to do sports is not only a recurring demand amongst asylum seekers, but also an excellent way to get to know each other and exchange with one another in a horizontal setting. Members of our sports team, featuring both centre residents and students (who aren’t necessarily Sciences Po Refugee Help volunteers!) gather once a week to play informal football matches. A more formal initiative, called the ‘No Border Club’, was also created, and is composed of both a football and a cricket team that train once a week. These teams are composed of Sciences Po students (who had registered for these kinds of sports at school) and centre residents. Sciences Po Refugee Help ensures that all players are provided with adequate material, and organises matches with other teams in the city.
Contact us! Write to social.activities@refugeehelp.fr
MEET THE CORDINATORS
CLARA CHEVRIER
Hello! My name is Clara and I’m a Spanish PSIA student of International Development. I love traveling and windsurfing. After having some experiences in a refugee camp in Greece and in Spain, I decided to get involved in SPRH. I think it is very important to engage ourselves because things that for us might seem very small things can mean and help a lot forotherpeople.
JOSI PREISSIER
Hey, my name is Josi and I am a student of the Master in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action at Science Po. I am from Germany and lived the last years in the Netherlands doing my Bachelor in International Relations. The issue of refugees is very close to my heart after I worked in Chile in an NGO which helped to integrate people into the local community. The work was very heartwarming and touching and made me aware of the daily, smaller and bigger, struggles which refugees have to go through. Therefore, I am glad to now be a Coordinator of the Social Activities team of SPRH to continue this work here in France.