Civic service

Hosting 3,000 civic service missions in third places

From hands-on learning and ecological transition to sustainable food, digital inclusion and cultural mediation… Third places are devising practical responses to the challenges facing our society and developing hyper-local solutions on a daily basis.

They are doing this by encouraging collaboration and collective activities, building bridges between disciplines, and allowing freedom for experimentation. These sites act as veritable “initiative factories”, which are developing collective entrepreneurship and promoting individual emancipation. Because transmission, education and practice are embedded in their DNA, many of them declare their affiliation to the popular education movement. Hosting civic service volunteers in third places addresses the need to support, train and promote the engagement of young people, in the interest of society but also to facilitate their own personal development

The civic service missions proposed by third places could also support young people by enabling them to participate in the running of “repair cafés”, discover digital tools, participate in the development of shared gardens or in the presentation of cooking workshops, etc.

According to a survey conducted by France Tiers-Lieux in 2020, 20% of third places have already hosted civic service volunteers, i.e. around 500 to 1,000 civic service missions* carried out in third places each year. One of the challenges ahead is to support the smallest third places, which are sometimes hindered by their unawareness of schemes to facilitate the hosting of civic service volunteers. France Tiers-Lieu, as the national network leader, will be supporting the plan to assign young people on civic service schemes to third places in order to facilitate the procedures for those hosting volunteers, and to guarantee the quality of the support provided.

* Estimate obtained with an average of 1 to 2 civic service volunteers per third place

Service civique

Key figures

€20 million for funding

3,000 young people on civic service missions over 3 years