Since 2016, Woodyard has been buying, cutting, bagging and distributing wood throughout the camps on the northern France-UK border. It is part of the emergency humanitarian response to cover the basic and primary needs of people in exile during the cold season. Faced with extremely difficult living conditions, we distribute up to 10 tonnes of wood a week, which totalled almost 300 tonnes last winter.
In winter, wood is a matter of survival for over 1,000 people living in the shantytowns and other informal settlements of Calais and Grande Synthe (Dunkirk). The wood distributed is used constantly during the winter to keep warm, cook the food distributed by our partner the Calais Food Collective, dry clothes, make coffee, and so on.
The Woodyard team is committed to working in solidarity with the people. They question and fight against the dynamics of oppression encountered on the ground and within it, yet also against humanitarian governance, which can sometimes be the source of powerful relationships of domination. To do this, volunteers deliver and distribute firewood right in the heart of the most intimate places, seeking to meet people's needs on an individual basis, whilst respecting fairness and dignity.
Our work challenges the mechanisms of competition and essentialization of exile, adapting to the needs and spatialization of living spaces and not the other way around. These mechanisms make WoodYard a team that quickly gives volunteers a great deal of autonomy and a detailed knowledge of places and their inhabitants. This enables us to join forces with other organizations to better respond to the difficulties of living conditions on the border. Our actions offer moments of exchange, sharing and sociability, but we are also confronted with the violent reality of institutionalized precariousness, as well as exposure to state and police violence.
Le travail du woodyard, bien que physique et fatigant, s’adresse à tous, sans distinction de genre, d’âge, d’expérience du bois ou du monde associatif.
For these reasons, we recommend that you come and work with us for at least a month, so that you can become independent, begin to understand the situation in Calais and build relationships with the people who live there.
We're looking forward to seeing you!