France receives among the highest number of asylum applications in Europe, and its reception system consistently runs short of the food, shelter and human attention people need while they wait.
In Paris, Utopia 56 and Serve the City Paris meet those needs nightly with small staffs and volunteer labor. Emergency shelters welcome roughly 50 families one evening. Street distributions reach people sleeping in camps, in doorways and in the open, some of them families with young children, some of them expelled from more structured camps, all of them dependent on nongovernmental organizations for the next meal, a drink of water or a safe place to sleep.
In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the CADA reception center houses asylum-seeking families in a village that hid and protected refugees during World War II. Residents there face a different set of problems: isolation, distance, language and the waiting itself cut them off from ordinary life.
Students will work alongside Utopia 56 and Serve the City Paris. Evening welcome and morning discharge shifts at an emergency family shelter include meal service, childcare, games, setup and cleanup. Warehouse teams sort, load and organize donated materials. Street rotations prepare and distribute food, water and hygiene kits, and soup kitchen shifts carry students from raw ingredients to handing a boxed meal to someone on the street.
Students will design and deliver to CADA residents of all ages a multi-day camp including sports, creative arts, dancing, cooking, STEM, language exchange, high ropes, hiking, mindfulness and a farewell celebration. Because activities repeat daily, residents can participate, rest, connect and be known as something other than an asylum case. Sports and art do the work that shared language cannot.
The program closes with a study of Marseille as a historical and contemporary site of migration.
Students do not need to speak French. They need to be willing to show up, adapt and pay attention. In 2026, 15 students from 11 majors contributed 1,080 documented service hours across three partner organizations.
I arrived in France with frameworks and left with people attached to them, and that is a different and more durable kind of knowledge than anything I could have built in a classroom.
Students are required to sign up for six hours of credit. The registrar will enroll you in courses for your program, including one class from each of the program's faculty.
