L'Espace Convivial Citoyen
Country
France
Description
The project creates a place where people suffering from social exclusion caused by mental health problems can practice peer support/peer advocacy in order to recover the ability to exercise their rights as citizens. The Espace Convivial Citoyen (ECC) is a place of socialising and mutual support for people suffering from their mental state and/or isolation, where autonomy and responsibility are encouraged. The best efforts are made to keep the place welcoming and warm, to create the conditions for free expression and creativity.
Aims
Many people with mental health problems suffer because of isolation, discrimination, and a general lack of care and comprehension from the general population. The ECC has the following aims:
- Beyond a purely medical answer, people with mental health problems need a dedicated place where they can exist as full human beings instead of mere patients.
- Advocate for disadvantaged people.
- Defend the rights of people with special needs.
- Increase awareness of public authorities on the subject.
Promote human solidarity through accepting differences.
Areas
Leisure, Social services
Effectiveness
Users and carers alike are involved in the choice, implementation and animation of social activities, e.g. theatre, drums, plastic art, paper writing, thematic talks, concerts, gardening, hiking, cooking. The ECC is open on all days (also during holidays).
Sustainability
The ECC is approved as a self-help group (law 11.02.2005) and financed (75000 euros) partly by the state.
Innovation
In France, stigma and discrimination towards people with mental health problems and their spaces are very prevalent. It is therefore necessary to support participation and citizenship. The very aim of the ECC is to allow disadvantaged people to regain the exercise of their full rights as citizens.
The structure welcomes all people without distinctions and attempts to create or strengthen bonds between groups of citizen.
Added Value
The ECC helps to support autonomy, more social integration and a more rewarding social life. Other positive outcomes of the ECC are :
- To regain dignity, identity, skills and limits, and hope.
- Development of initiative, self confidence and self respect.
- Exercising responsibilities based on mutual confidence.
- Individual and collective acknowledgement.
- Getting involved in actions to relieve the suffering.
- Rediscovering own abilities.
- Exercising freedom of choice.
- Experiencing friendship, solidarity, tolerance, comprehension.
- Complementing the traditional health care.
Transferability
This model exist in many European countries: other similar experiments already took place in Italy, Greece and England under the condition to gather a sufficiently large group of people interested in the concept and raising sufficient funds.
Mainstreaming Potential
These spaces are approved by local and national instances (who also contributed to the funding) with the aim to:
- Working towards a better acknowledgement of mental health problems in the society.
- Increasing the weight of directly concerned people in political decisions.
The opinion of the patient is required - cf. the notion of the global approach of the person-House of the Handicap (in the new law for disabled people 2006).
Costs of the Project
100.000 euros
People involved in the Project (number of people and profession)
80/100 persons in each place, users, volunteers and NGO employees.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Project
It is very important to accompany this project by a program by self-training of the users, self-directed evaluation by research-action; to be open to the social community and not to create a "ghetto"; to achieve a balance between supporting people and "running" their project.
Contact Person for the Project
ADVOCACY France
5 place des Fêtes
75019 Paris
+33 1 45 32 22 35
advocacyfrance@orange.fr