After their calculator had reached the final sum, the two volunteers working for the Restos du cœur association were distinctly ill at ease. They had disappointing news to give Victoria, a Ukrainian mother sitting in front of them in the charity’s centre in Rueil-Malmaison, a suburb west of Paris. “We’re in an awkward situation madam,” said Monique-Odile Moulin, one of the volunteers. “You’re in a difficult situation, and so are we.” This winter, unlike the last, the charity would not be able to provide food parcels for Victoria and her son – only her mother was entitled to receive the aid.
Posted in the office was an announcement in French and several other languages. “The Restos du cœur have been compelled to change the rules for access to food aid this winter,” it read, “the association being no longer able to meet the rise in the number of beneficiaries.” On top of having to refuse some applicants, the amount of aid provided this winter will be less. “Previously, the winter scale [of aid] was more generous than that of the summer, because in winter, for example, one must also pay for heating,” said Moulin. “Now the scale is the same for the winter and summer campaigns.”
Created in 1985 by the late French comic and actor Coluche, the association Les Restos du cœur (literally, restaurants of the heart, or love) runs a nationwide network of food banks and mobile street kitchens, which distribute the aid free of charge, managed by tens of thousands of volunteers. But in a television interview in early September, the association’s president, Patrice Douret, himself a volunteer, announced that the situation was “no longer tenable”. Against a sharp rise in the demand for food aid – the association reported that between 2022 and 2023, the number of meals served up in its street kitchens had risen by 35% – there had been a parallel fall in donations.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“At the current rhythm, if nothing is done, even the Restos du cœur could shut up shop between now and three years’ time,” said Douret. To survive in the short-term, the charity decided to reduce both the amount of aid it provided and the numbers of people granted access to the food parcels, an access which is based on a calculation of a person’s earnings and expenditures. The association estimates around 150,000 people will be refused access by the year’s end.
The interview with Douret triggered a series of promises of donations in what were, for many big donors, barely disguised PR campaigns. The government immediately announced it was giving 15 million euros for the association (whereas in fact 10 million euros had already been allocated), while the family of France’s richest individual, Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of luxury goods group LVMH, promised a cheque for 10 million euros. Other donations were from the French national football team, a bank foundation, the Rungis food market that serves Paris, and oil and gas giant TotalEnergies.
But the extra funding was still not enough to reverse the decision “to put in place braking measures”, as Douret put it in an interview with France Info radio on November 21st on the occasion of the launch of the charity’s winter campaign.
We’ll have to refuse many more over the coming weeks.
In the Restos du cœur centre in Rueil-Malmaison, Victoria took the disappointing news stoically. She, her son and her mother arrived in France following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Her situation is this year a little better than last, although still financially precarious. “If she had this same income last year, she and her son would have qualified to receive our aid,” commented Monique-Odile Moulin. Victoria politely reassured Moulin: “As soon as we arrived in France we were helped very much.”
Like many others, Victoria was unaware of the revision in the Restos du cœur calculations as to who can benefit from its aid. Sitting in the waiting room for her turn to apply for food aid this winter was Sanae, who was only now learning of the change of criteria. She told Mediapart that if she was refused, “it would pose big problems” for her family. A mother of two, she said the family’s only income comes from her husband’s short-term contracts in the building trade. She is looking for a job, and said she would take on undeclared work “if need be”.
The documents in which applicants detail their income are laid out on top of four tables, and the registrations of those entitled to the food aid began earlier this month. Moulin said that she and her and her fellow volunteers have so far refused “four or five” out of the some 40 households who applied “in two days”. But she fears what is to come. “We’ll have to refuse many more over the coming weeks, when people see the adverts and will want to come and register,” she said.
“The announcement by the president of the Restos fell upon us,” said Dominique Octavie, who mans the reception office, over which hangs a photo of the charity’s founder, Coluche. Another volunteer, Marc Lebourg, described the decision to limit the numbers receiving aid as “brutal” but, like all at the centre, he recognised the necessity of the measure.
Scaling down the food parcels
In the town of Melun, a little more than 70 kilometres south-east of Reuil-Malmaison and close to Fontainebleau, the Restos du Cœur centre is situated in a former sub-post office in the middle of a socially deprived neighbourhood. In a corridor, lit by a yellowish glow from neon lights, is a large poster explaining the usual manner in which food aid is calculated, using a points system; a jar of jam was valued at one point, as was also a tin of sausages and lentils. But since the introduction of the emergency measures, the poster is covered in hand-written corrections.
Not only has the aid this winter been reduced to the less generous summer rate, but the portions in the distributed aid parcels have been reduced also. “Before, a single person had nine points, but as of now it’ll be seven,” explained Bernard Tirman, one of the centre’s volunteers. “For a couple, we’ve gone from 12 [points] to eight.”
“It’s clear we expected something to happen, but not this double sentence,” said Dominique Legrand, another volunteer. “The volunteers have the creeps, we don’t have a culture of ‘no’, even if we know why we [will] do it.”
“When we don’t have enough yoghurts and therefore decide to reserve them for families with children, it hurts a lot to tell the person who lives on their own that ‘no’ it’s not for them,” she added.
The only relief for the volunteers is that those applicants for aid who are close to qualifying, but nevertheless just on the wrong side of the revised conditions regarding income and expenditure, will still be given food parcels. They will be given smaller parcels, which are “worth four points” explained Tirman, as he tidied up the crates of food in the distribution hall, where once were piled postal bags.
A spokesperson for the Restos du Cœur said the association did not want to comment on the new criteria for receiving aid in order to avoid a situation in which those who might fear being refused food parcels simply do not turn up. That is all the more important, explained Monique-Odile Moulin from the Restos centre in Rueil-Malmaison, because “our role is also to explain that we can provide other support than food aid alone”, including “French lessons, the consultation sessions with the lawyer, and also help in finding work”. For her, it is essential to explain to people who are refused food aid that they are nevertheless welcome to make use of such services.
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Moulin’s colleague Marc Lebourg said that in their centre alone, “the numbers of people registered has climbed by 40% over the past two years”. Moulin added that the Hauts-de-Seine département (equivalent to a county) in which Rueil-Malmaison is situated is “rich, but with a lot of poor people”.
It is a similar story at the centre in Melun, where one of the volunteers recalled how, to meet the growing demand, “we had to give out [parcel] portions reduced by a quarter and, more rarely, half-portions”.
Seated in the waiting room where people hopeful of qualifying for aid were gathered, Tirman recalled long-gone periods when stock was even plentiful. “At one time we were at a level of competing with the stalls at [hypermarket chain] Carrefour and the likes,” he said.
Another volunteer at the Melun centre is Fabrice Gourhan, a former head of the Restos network in the surrounding Seine-et-Marne département, who is now an administrator for the charity at its national bureau. As such, he knew in advance of the impending changes to the criteria for the distribution of aid. He explained the emergency was brought on by a 47% rise over the past two years, at a national level, of the numbers of people registered with the association. “That means that there are centres where [the numbers] were multiplied four-fold,” he said. “People can tell themselves that an association like the Restos cannot become bankrupt, but when one is managing 60,000 tonnes of foodstuffs per year there has to be a system of logistics, and that is very expensive.”
Aside from some major donations given to the association following the September interview with its president Patrice Douret, there were also discussions to set up partnerships, notably with certain supermarket retail chains but, argued Gourhan, what is required is a national “food aid plan”. Instead, he said, the recent episode has been “a damp squib”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse