After January 2022, January 2023 and April 2024, the City of Marseille is launching its Solidarity Night for the 4th consecutive year, on January 23. The objective, explain the deputy mayor in charge of solidarity, Audrey Garino (PCF), and the prefect delegated for Equal Opportunities, Isabelle Epaillard, is to “take a picture of the situation of the homeless in Marseille, adapt public policy measures to support their care and encourage exchanges between municipal and state services.“
This national operation mobilizes citizens who, registered and trained, agree to volunteer to meet people experiencing extreme exclusion in the area of the greater Marseille city center. From 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., accompanied by an experienced professional, a thousand volunteers will walk the 125 sectors listed by the Samu social, to interact with the homeless and present them with a questionnaire intended to better take care of them.
More and more women, children and elderly people on the streets
The last edition, organized in the spring in order to measure needs also according to seasonality, made it possible to identify 442 people who were sleeping on the street, while 7,600 others spent the night in one of the accommodation centers city emergency. Every day, 200 calls to 115 are in vain and leave people without a reception solution. If 87% of the homeless people we met were men, 59% aged between 25 and 54, it appeared that the profile is changing rapidly in recent years. More and more women, children and elderly people find themselves on the streets for longer and longer periods of time. “However, the street damages, destroys and makes rehabilitation complex, hence the urgency to adapt public policies, for example by primarily opening small structures for isolated women and families.“, underlines Audrey Garino.
