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The ‘Civic Hour’ Is Reinventing Volunteering
“Agh, I am only getting consonants,” sighs Nicole Riberolles, the 104-year-old doyenne of Les Artistes nursing home in the Batignolles neighborhood of northwestern Paris.
There’s a Q, R, Y, W, N and an E lined up on her Scrabble letter holder. She sees nothing available, weaving her pearl necklace through her fingers in frustration.
But within a few turns, the aging matriarch rallies and lays down the word “EWE” — like in English, meaning a female sheep — on the board, a triple point-winning combo that earns her dozens of points and nudges her up to second place in the runnings.
A board game meet-up at a nursing home in Paris. Credit: Peter Yeung
“It’s good to work the brain,” she declares, brimming with pleasure at her fine work.
All across the room similar scenes are unfolding: tables of competitors, or perhaps more aptly, companions, are doing lively battle via various board games. There are shrieks of excitement, playful accusations of cheating. If it weren’t for the mass of walking sticks, strollers and wheelchairs, you could hardly guess it is a care home.
The weekly board games meet-up received an injection of energy a few years ago with the arrival of volunteer participants from the surrounding neighborhood. They form part of an initiative in France that is reinventing volunteering for the modern age, creating volunteers out of people who don’t think they have the time, and catalyzing mutual support at a time of disintegrating community ties.
“Volunteering is in crisis,” says Atanase Périfan, founder of the association l’Heure Civique, or Civic Hour. “People want to help, they want to feel useful. But they don’t want to be tied down. We have less and less time to ourselves. So they can’t commit.”
People of all ages helped to clean the streets around the Square du Maréchal Juin in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. Courtesy of l’Heure Civique
In 2025, 13 million French people, about 24 percent of the population, volunteered for charitable organizations, down from 15 million in 2016, or 29 percent, according to a report by France Bénévolat, a nonprofit. “Traditional forms of engagement, often regular and intensive, are gradually giving way to more occasional and flexible practices,” it concluded. “Younger generations, in particular, favor direct or occasional involvement, often motivated by concrete projects and specific causes.”
France is far from an outlier. The U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps found that formal volunteer participation fell to 23.2 percent in 2021, the lowest level in nearly two decades. Yet it also found that informal helping rates “largely remained” steady, suggesting that people may not be becoming less generous so much as changing how they engage.
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L’Heure Civique therefore takes a no-strings-attached approach to volunteering. It asks people to simply volunteer for at least an hour each month in their communities — tending to someone’s garden, delivering groceries, taking someone to the doctor or giving schoolkids help with homework. Some months people may participate more, others less so, and that’s completely fine, since their combined efforts add up.
“It’s a new form of commitment, everyone does what they can,” explains Périfan, who is now also deputy mayor for Paris’ 17th district, responsible for social issues.
“There are 65 million people in France. If each person contributes just one hour — and who doesn’t have an hour? — the potential is massive.”
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