It was during the early days of the conflict in Syria and the waves of survivors taking the road to exile that the creation of Utopia 56 began to take shape. The images of little Aylan being cradled by the waves on the beach went around the world and shocked many. Yann Manzi, like so many others, was stunned in front of his television. “Why aren’t you doing anything, Dad?” his 5-and-a-half-year-old son Liam asked him. “It felt like a nuclear bomb went off in my head and in my wife’s,” recalls Yann Manzi. They both decided to go to Calais the following weekend. This event triggered the creation of Utopia 56.
Yann is a campsite manager at the largest music festivals in Europe. The idea was to bring his skills in event organization, team building, and volunteer management. He quickly identified what was lacking on site: waste collection. “We became the garbage collectors of the Calais jungle,” he explains. “We cleaned up plots every day with the exiles and other associations. At the start, that was Utopia’s sole mission.”
Today, the association has 8 branches, including one in Paris, organizes outreach missions along the coast, particularly focusing on unaccompanied minors, and has a facility with 150 places in the capital to welcome women and children, "to make these invisibles visible.”
“It is important to take action,” he argues. “We are a small army of volunteers, joining the ranks of defenders of fundamental rights worldwide, fighting to ensure that coexistence does not disappear, for a slightly fairer society.”
