Eco-volunteering in broad daylight

The Foundation has been involved with eco-volunteering since 2006, as an educational tool for the environment and as an extension of its campaigns towards social awareness. At its request, “A Pas de Loup”, an association of volunteers for nature and the foremost French organisation for eco-volunteering, produced in 2007 an inventory of eco-volunteering in France.

Carried out with the help of 31 organisations¹ that offer unpaid nature activities, this study first of all highlighted the richness and the diversity of French eco-volunteering both with regard to the structures in place and the themes proposed, but it also showed that behind this dynamism another fact was hidden - that the projects and their supporting structures are still for the most part little known about either by the general public or by the institutions.

The Foundation committed itself to set up a tool to promote all of the organisations that work to protect and/or manage nature habitats.

After more than three years of work in conjunction with the association “A Pas de Loup”, the Year of Biodiversity sees the fulfilment of this aim with the on-line publication of the internet platform: www.jagispourlanature.org.

Eco-volunteers are anonymous people who donate thousands of days per year, and make it possible to carry out activities which maintain the natural environment and habitats, provide protection and follow-ups of endangered species, eco-building, public education and awareness, etc.

Their participation is essential to the smooth running and sometimes to the very existence of numerous conservation programs. Indeed the budgets allocated for the protection of nature are often insufficient and the structures need support as much at a financial level as at a human level to be able to pursue their activities.

Jagispourlanature.org sets out to be a window for French eco-volunteering projects which provides better knowledge of these activities to the public, to the organisations that protect and manage the environment and to the local authorities that want to set up new projects.

Jagispourlanature.org carries out the function of a reliable intermediary because it obliges the organisations that are setting up projects to work within a framework laid out in an eco-volunteering charter (see annex) which specifies the type of activities which may be proposed, the themes, the sector of the public to be targeted, the requirements of environmental coherence, etc…

A Daily control of the offers proposed is carried out by the association “A Pas de Loup” which is the administrator of the platform.