Do you want to welcome Ukrainians to your home out of solidarity and you don’t know how to go about it? We explain the procedure to you.
In France, currently 35,510 households have applied to welcome Ukrainian refugees into their homes. A surge of solidarity, especially in Toulouse. The twin city of Kiev currently has 1,400 families ready to host refugees. On Friday March 11, 2022, more than 10,000 people from Ukraine arrived in France according to the Ministry of the Interior.
According to the Red Cross, our country will be able to accommodate 50,000 to 100,000 people. At the local level, in the Gers for example, 610 households declared themselves volunteers for this reception in half a day. Here are the steps to participate in this mutual aid.
The first instruction to remember is a recommendation from the Red Cross : it is better to be a professional host to pretend to host Ukrainian families.
Indeed, the latter need particular psychological support, and not everyone can improvise as a host. Jean-Christophe Combe, head of the French Red Cross, tells the Sunday newspaper that accommodation in private homes is “very little demand“. “For now we are not overwhelmed“, he reports. He quotes the available places listed by the prefectures as “vacant social housing, unoccupied buildings” as well as the mobilization of actors from the hotel industry or Airbnb. “But in the coming weeks, things will accelerate very strongly“, he predicts.
The people arriving in France are mainly women, children and the elderly, “fragile and vulnerable“Recalls the head of the Red Cross. For him, if individuals can accommodate strangers for a weekend, the situation may become complicated if the crisis takes hold over time. “It upsets family life, it creates tension. However, once again, these refugees are in a fragile situation” precise Christophe Combe at the Journal du Dimanche. And to conclude:if the influx is massive, we will have no choice but to use these accommodations, but it must be a last resort, if the system were to be saturated“.
Upper Garonne. Several town halls have set up an online census system of households ready to accommodate. This is the case of Toulouse which proposes to fill this online form. Almost all requests are accepted.
Gers. In the Gers, the prefecture lists the professionals authorized to receive refugees with this online form. The department, for its part, collects all forms of aid on this website. To offer private accommodation to Ukrainians, you are asked to contact the social toll-free number managed by Gers Solidaire: 0 800 32 31 30 reachable from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday.
Other departments. In other departments of Occitania, all requests, from individuals and professionals, must be made on the sites of the prefectures. This is the case of Tarn for example or Tarn et Garonne.
Some town halls and prefectures have not organized themselves to identify requests. In any case, know that the government has put in place a online platform in order to allow French people who so wish to offer their accommodation or any other type of assistance.
To sum up, if you have the possibility and the desire to receive Ukrainians in your home, first approach your town hall, your department or even the government which will put you in touch with an association in order to show solidarity in the best conditions for you but also for those you are going to help.
It is all the more necessary to be registered to guide them as well as some women are expected at the borders of Ukraine “by certain individuals and mafia groups to integrate them into prostitution networks or to take advantage of their economic distress“explains the journalist Maïa Mazaurette on the show Day-to-day.
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