The ‘Civic Hour’ Is Reinventing Volunteering

“Agh, I am only getting consonants,” sighs Nicole Riberolles, the 104-year-old doyenne of Les Artistes nursing home in the Batignolles neighborhood of northwestern Paris.

There’s a Q, R, Y, W, N and an E lined up on her Scrabble letter holder. She sees nothing available, weaving her pearl necklace through her fingers in frustration.

But within a few turns, the aging matriarch rallies and lays down the word “EWE”, like in English, meaning a female sheep, on the board, a triple point-winning combo that earns her dozens of points and nudges her up to second place in the runnings.

A board game meet-up at a nursing home in Paris. Credit: Peter Yeung

“It’s good to work the brain,” she declares, brimming with pleasure at her fine work.

All across the room similar scenes are unfolding: tables of competitors, or perhaps more aptly, companions, are doing lively battle via various board games. There are shrieks of excitement, playful accusations of cheating. If it weren’t for the mass of walking sticks, strollers and wheelchairs, you could hardly guess it is a care home.

The weekly board games meet-up received an injection of energy a few years ago with the arrival of volunteer participants from the surrounding neighborhood. They form part of an initiative in France that is reinventing volunteering for the modern age, creating volunteers out of people who don’t think they have the time, and catalyzing mutual support at a time of disintegrating community ties.

“Volunteering is in crisis,” says Atanase Périfan, founder of the association l’Heure Civique, or Civic Hour. “People want to help, they want to feel useful. But they don’t want to be tied down. We have less and less time to ourselves. So they can’t commit.”

People of all ages helped to clean the streets around the Square du Maréchal Juin in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. Courtesy of l’Heure Civique

In 2025, 13 million French people, about 24 percent of the population, volunteered for charitable organizations, down from 15 million in 2016, or 29 percent, according to a report by France Bénévolat, a nonprofit. “Traditional forms of engagement, often regular and intensive, are gradually giving way to more occasional and flexible practices,” it concluded. “Younger generations, in particular, favor direct or occasional involvement, often motivated by concrete projects and specific causes.”

France is far from an outlier. The U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps found that formal volunteer participation fell to 23.2 percent in 2021, the lowest level in nearly two decades. Yet it also found that informal helping rates “largely remained” steady, suggesting that people may not be becoming less generous so much as changing how they engage.

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L’Heure Civique therefore takes a no-strings-attached approach to volunteering. It asks people to simply volunteer for at least an hour each month in their communities, tending to someone’s garden, delivering groceries, taking someone to the doctor or giving schoolkids help with homework. Some months people may participate more, others less so, and that’s completely fine, since their combined efforts add up.

“It’s a new form of commitment, everyone does what they can,” explains Périfan, who is now also deputy mayor for Paris’ 17th district, responsible for social issues.

“There are 65 million people in France. If each person contributes just one hour, and who doesn’t have an hour?, the potential is massive.”

Credit: Peter Yeung

L'Heure Civique is reinventing volunteering for the modern age, creating volunteers out of people who don’t think they have the time, and catalyzing mutual support at a time of disintegrating community ties.

Périfan, a longtime resident of Paris’s 17th arrondissement, has been involved in community projects in the area since the 1990s. It all began when he was stunned to read a grim news segment: An elderly woman was found dead in her apartment in Paris. Socially isolated, she had lain there for four months before being discovered.

“It’s terrible to have somebody so detached from society,” says Périfan. “We can’t let this happen. I told myself: We need to make a pretext for speaking with one another, we need to create a strategy that makes people connect more.”

And Périfan’s community-focused, every-little-bit-helps formula has grown to have a significant footprint across the country. Today, some 250 French municipalities are participating in l’Heure Civique, with more than 24,000 volunteers signed up.

Back at the care home in Paris, Gilles Grindard is taking part in his first board games session, along with a handful of other volunteers.

In January, volunteers from the Civic Hour gathered in the town of Agde in Southern France to collect waste from the coast as part of a cleanup action organized by Project Rescue Ocean. Courtesy of l’Heure Civique

The former civil servant began volunteering a year and a half ago, stewarding middle school students on a 30-minute walk to their music classes and helping with meal distributions to those in need. He had been hesitant to come to the care home due to his own fear of growing old. But by the end of the session, his opinion had flipped.

“It was wonderful,” says Grindard. “They were very friendly and chatty. I enjoyed it. I had no reason to be afraid. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”

Pascal Guy, another volunteer, actually discovered the program first as a beneficiary of the free meals. He now volunteers for several hours a month, sometimes as much as a dozen, but appreciates the lack of obligation or pressure to participate. Guy says he usually receives a call on the morning of an event asking if he’s available or not.

“Sometimes I’m just not in the right mood,” he explains. “That won’t be useful to anyone if I show up. But most of the time, it does me good to come here, to feel a bit useful.”

Nathan Dietz, research director for the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, which specializes in social change and philanthropy, believes that flexible, opt-in systems like that of l’Heure Civique are the future of volunteering in a turbulent world.

“We see a lot of good healthy habits were broken due to the [Covid-19] lockdown, and a lot of people haven’t built back those habits,” he says. “The more anybody can do to make it easier to volunteer, to reduce friction, the better chance you will have to attract people.”

Dietz, lead author on the 2024 report Social Connectedness and Generosity: A Look at How Associational Life and Social Connections Influence Volunteering and Giving, argues that volunteering in turn has far greater impacts beyond the initial act itself.

His research found that people who volunteered in the previous year were more likely to donate in the current year by 14.5 percent, and people who donated in the previous year were 9.3 percent more likely to volunteer in the current year.

Another curious finding was that volunteering and giving appear to increase the likelihood that adults vote in national elections, controlling for all other factors. “Getting people to realize they have a stake in their communities, getting them to volunteer, it really strengthens society and democracy,” he adds.

In fact, Périfan and other advocates argue that community-based volunteering plays a crucial role in society, particularly at a time of government budget cuts.

An intergenerational school support session in Plonévez-du-Faou in Brittany. Courtesy of l’Heure Civique

“We have an aging population in France, they will retire soon, but they need to continue with physical and mental activities,” says Mathilde Monnier, manager for l’Heure Civique’s projects with senior citizens. “Health workers, they don’t have the time to talk and discuss. But our volunteers do.”

But despite such responsibility and the fact that it works on a national scale with tens of thousands of volunteers, l’Heure Civique only has about a dozen paid staff. The team relies on financing from retirement funds and other national funds, and asks the municipalities that it works with to advertise the volunteering sessions.

Those layers of bureaucracy can make management of the system difficult, as does the fact that the no-commitment model means that volunteers come and go. “It’s much more difficult to organize, but we had to create this model,” says Périfan.

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Meanwhile, although the flexibility of the system does permit working adults to participate, 80 percent of volunteers are retired, the majority of them women. It remains a challenge to get younger participants to enroll.

Yet in an increasingly individualized world, l’Heure Civique is banking on the power of the collective to help communities thrive. In the next few years it hopes to increase its volunteer base in France to over a million and to expand to five continents.

“Generosity is a renewable energy,” says Périfan. “People want to feel useful. And that citizen generosity cultivates political action.”

The post The ‘Civic Hour’ Is Reinventing Volunteering appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.