Cédric Herrou and his association DTC – Défends Ta Citoyenneté, created in September 2017 to host asylum seekers on his farm, are launching the first entirely agrarian Emmaus community in France: Emmaus Roya.
After having been led to house asylum seekers for the medium and long term, they became aware of the strength of community and farming to rehabilitate people. They open the community to other people in situations of exclusion, allowing for greater diversity.
For the founders, “this new Emmaus community in the Roya valley, combining solidarity and ecology, is a concrete response to exclusion, migration management, and the environmental crisis, in the face of immobile and irresponsible policies.”
It all began in 2018, during the promotion of Michel Toesca’s film Libre: the activists of the Roya became aware of and realized the scale of this movement, a strong network of over 288 groups in France and 350 internationally, with reuse and sustainable development at the core of their mission.
This contact sparked the idea of being the first Emmaus community whose activity would not be the collection and recycling of goods but farming.
The goal of Cédric Herrou and his team is to show that with Emmaus Roya, it is possible to provide intersecting responses to issues of environmental and social exclusion, to tangibly connect climate justice and social justice.
