Confronting Hunger in the USA

Searching for Community Empowerment and Food Security in Food Access Programs

Adam M. Pine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317162063
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Food insecurity in the US is a critical issue that is experienced by approximately 15% of the population each year. Hunger is not caused by an inability to produce enough food for the population, but is instead a manifestation of federal agricultural policies that support the overproduction of commodity crops and neoliberal social policies that seek to lower the amount of benefits dispersed to those in need. This book focuses on how four different food-based community programs address both the physical sensation of hunger as well as the political and economic disempowerment that work against the ability of people experiencing food insecurity to mobilize as a political force. Confronting Hunger in the USA argues that most food programs do more to create community among their volunteers than among program participants and tend to reinforce neoliberal understandings of citizenship. Community food programs reach out to the most vulnerable members of society in caring and gentle ways and often use the language of alternative economies to articulate a different relationship between the individual and the state. However, the projects in this study act as individual pieces of the state's insufficient social safety net and are only beginning to articulate a new relationship between food and society.

3 Creating Community and Empowerment in Community-based Food Programs

DOI: 10.4324/9781315573427-3

Most organizations exist,

not for the benefit of the organized,

but for the benefit of the organizers.

When the organizers try to organize the unorganized

they do no organize themselves.

If everybody organized himself,

Everybody would be organized.

There is no better way to be

than to be

what we want the other fellow to be.¹

By way of analogy, each individual service program is like a tree. But when enough service programs surround people, they come to live in a forest of services. The environment is different from the neighborhood or community. And people who have to live in the service forest will act differently than those people whose lives are principally defined by neighborhood relationships.²

There is an intrinsic connection between food and community: food and restaurant advertising is awash with images of happy people eating together, festivals are often marked by communal meals, and barbecues, brunches, and dinners are key ways in which families and friends come together (Bell and Valentine 1993). Likewise, the slow food movement advocates taking more time to cherish food together, and critiques mainstream fast food for its focus on convenience over quality (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010). Churches—which host many food access programs—stress ideas like “breaking bread together” in which food is a symbol of god’s love that brings people together (Miles 2007). From a community organizing perspective, scholars of famine and hunger argue that political and social marginalization is closely connected to hunger (Morton et al. 2005; Watts and Bohle 1993). However, as Bell and Valentine note “communities are about exclusion as well as inclusion; and food is one way in which boundaries get drawn, and insiders and outsiders distinguished” (2007, 91). Thus, while food access programs could be places where participants interact and build relationships with one another, using food as a common unifier is not as easy as it sounds. Even though the programs I analyzed were different in design and methodology, my findings are strongly resonant of Janet Poppendieck’s (1999) work 15 years ago: for the vast majority of participants, CHUM, RFP, and SHARE food access programs were places to get food but not a space where clients formed friendships or even had a particularly enjoyable time picking out their food.

Finding community within food programs that distribute food is surprisingly difficult; for the participants at these programs one could cynically label them spaces of “anti-community:” at CHUM individuals are interviewed in a process similar to visiting a social worker, and then accompanied by volunteers who ensure they take only the food they are allotted. Similarly, participants of RFP and SHARE get together once a month to pick up their food, but spend little time interacting at the pickup site with one another while they get their food, or learning about the values associated with the program. Many arrive hours early at RFP, but the waiting area feels a little more like the waiting room at a dentist’s office than a community festival or social hour.

SoS, which uses agriculture as a form of job training, stands out as a program that connects food access with a strong community-building component. In fact, many participants were so isolated when they originally entered the program that their only close friends were other members of their SoS work crew. The large amount of time that crewmembers spent accomplishing the common task of urban agriculture helped them to build connections with other members of their crew. Likewise, staff spent a lot of time with crewmembers, educating them about the agricultural production process, teaching them how to cook and eat the foods they were growing, and simply hanging out spending unstructured time together driving from field to field or running the organization’s food stall at a local farmers market. This time together meant that there were often good feelings and connections between staff and crewmembers. While SoS dealt with a much smaller number of people than the other distributive programs, its impact on the lives of program participants was much stronger and significant.

In this chapter I examine the relationship between community and food access. I ask: Are RFP, CHUM, SoS, and SHARE structured in ways that create community among their participants? How is clientelization enacted at the programs? In answering these questions, I make two arguments. First, the structure of SHARE, CHUM, and RFP tended to create community among program volunteers but clientelize program participants. In this way, they tended to act in a manner similar to McKnight’s (1995) allusion to the forest in the opening epigraph: they are self-contained systems that serve the needs of volunteers to have a positive social outlet for their volunteer work and meet participants’ short-term need for food. At RFP and SHARE, leadership teams formed that transformed individuals into leaders of food access programs, but this sense of ownership and mutuality was not extended to clients. Second, feelings about food were a particular place where differences between program volunteers and program participants emerged. While volunteers at CHUM and RFP shared family meals and enriched their lives through communal eating, clients had a much more instrumental view of food and this difference created tension. This disparity is devastating because program organizers, who came from very different socio-political contexts, tended to have somewhat paternalistic views of the eating habits of program participants (Guthman 2008), and did not always valorize the complex and multifaceted ways that participants used food. The devolution of care work to non-state actors allows for their biases to control program formation, and creates a stasis within the organizations that prevents them from mobilizing for greater social change. SoS—even though they operated at a very small scale—were able to avoid much of the clientelization and created a real sense of community among their clients. Urban agriculture as an activity did not create community so much as the ample space for interaction between program participants and shared sense of vision among program staff. This was a space where empowerment and community were much more visible.

While the concept of community is notoriously murky, most commentators agree that (1) area (physical proximity), (2) common interest (such as identity or specific issues), and (3) social interaction (i.e. meaningful time together) bind groups of people together (Bell and Newby 1978; Laverack 2004; Bell and Valentine 1997). Amitai Etzioni (2004), writing in this tradition argues that communities are

social entities that have two elements. One, a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individual relationships that often crisscross and reinforce on another […] the other, a measure of commitment to a set of shared values, norms, and meanings, and a shared history and identity—in short to a particular culture.

(225)

Because the food-insecure population is spatially dispersed and volunteers tended to live in different neighborhoods from where they volunteered, it is the second two focuses of community that I concentrate on in this analysis: social interaction and a shared sense of values and norms. I argue that the programs were structured in such a way that multi-threaded relationships between volunteers at CHUM—as well as leadership teams at RFP and SHARE—had a chance to build, but for participants at these programs there was not a chance for this sort of integration.

Communities are not natural pre-existing things but are instead socially constructed entities that embody both descriptive and ascriptive elements. As Anderson (1983) writes in his analysis of the national community “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined (6),” and thus while a person may belong to multiple communities a specific process of discussion and nurturance must be used in order to unite people. While Anderson traces this process at the dawn of the modern era among large groups of people, the process of “creating community” for the purpose of community empowerment means identifying and defining a common element (or ailment) and using that shared experience to draw people together (Alinsky 1971). Glen Laverack, writing in the context of health promotion for empowerment notes that “heterogeneous individuals are able to achieve collective action through a process that involves personal action and the development of small groups, organization and networks, in effect the development of community” (45). Hence, a key part of community organizing and community empowerment is the creation of communities based on common interest and need, which can be difficult to identify and unify around in diverse spaces (Young 1990). Therefore, even if program participants do not come in with preexisting sets of multi-threaded connections they can be formed through program design, and programs can be used to build a shared sense of identity to use in the process of mobilization. Thus, creating a sense of community is part of the process of community empowerment, and since this was not seen among the participants in RFP, SHARE or CHUM there was no sort of mobilization among these groups.

A difficulty in creating community within organizations that exist as part of the shadow state is the fact that as the state has withdrawn from the delivery of services to the most vulnerable, these organizations have become professionalized in order to fill this void. CHUM and RFP are serving so many people with such high levels of food insecurity that including any priorities besides the delivery of food was not feasible. Therefore, spaces and times for volunteers and clients to spend time together were eliminated in favor of a streamlining of the distribution process. Further, volunteers perform a form of work: unlike clubs or organizations where everyone is on the same level, there is inherent stratification to relationships at large food access programs (Musick and Wilson 2008; Putman 2000). Volunteers see themselves as delivering services to a population in need and use their identity as “workers” to distance themselves from program participants.

Strengthening Relationships, Building Friendships, and Serving Participants

At each of the distributive food programs (CHUM, RFP, and SHARE) volunteers came together on a regular basis and completed tasks together: sorting food for distribution, setting up the distribution site, helping participants select and carry food, and cleaning up the distribution site at the end of the night. For them, volunteering was a place where community was formed through enjoyable social interactions. Completing these tasks was a source of joy and inspiration in their lives and fulfilled something for them. Kia, an RFP organizer, described the other volunteers at the program in this way:

I think they all have a good heart and I think they all have pretty much the same type of compassion for people that are really in dire straits or who has those needs, you know, to have people have a healthier food diet or at least give them those options throughout the month.

Volunteering at one of these institutions was to step into a world where service to others and providing a basic human right was so important the volunteers carved time out of their lives in order to make this desire a reality.

For participants, in contrast, each of the distributive programs served their immediate need for food, but tended to do little to attend to their needs for friendship, community, or political awareness that they might need or want. There was no task for them to accomplish to create interaction, there was no shared sense of history or culture between them, and no sense of political activity that was nurtured through program design. Instead, participants consistently described the programs as effectively meeting their needs for food and indicated that their level of food security would be lower were it not for the programs. They also talked about feelings of fellowship and camaraderie at the distribution site but always in less personal ways than the volunteers expressed. As Marisa, a participant at RFP, described her experiences with the volunteers:

They seat you very comfortably in the church area and they don’t question you about the reason you’re there. They make it very comfortable for you to be there in the first place, even though you’re struggling. That’s hard enough. They are very understanding about that. I do like that.

For many, they were grateful that the programs existed, and thankful that the volunteers had dedicated themselves to making the program work—because participants of the distributive programs came from low-income and chaotic lives, and the programs provided a necessary relief to the their difficulties.

As Table 3.1 summarizes, CHUM, RFP, and SHARE served a continuum of people with CHUM clientele the poorest, youngest, with the highest level of unemployment, and the highest levels of food insecurity; SHARE was at the other extreme. CHUM clientele were much more likely to be African-American or Native American, and RFP and SHARE served a majority white group of participants. As the vast majority of the volunteers at all of the sites were white, there was a distinct racial distinction between volunteers and participants at CHUM. Rates of food insecurity were well above the Duluth average for

Table 3.1 Selected Participant Demographic Data from CHUM, Ruby's Food Pantry, and SHARE.

	CHUM	RFP	SHARE
Median Monthly Household Income	$500–$999	$1500– $1,599	$2,000– $2,499
High Food Insecurity	51%	13%	2%
Low Food Insecurity	41%	53%	42%
Food Secure	4%	31%	55%
Unemployed Participants	51%	22%	14%
White	43%	93%	93%
African-American	31%	4%	2%
Native American	28%	5%	3%
Latino	0%	1%	1%
Households with Children > 18	19%	55%	69%
Percentage Female	53%	76%	71%
Median Age	43	45	54

participants in each of the case studies, ranging from close to 100% for CHUM participants to 45% at SHARE. Children were present in the vast majority of SHARE households and two-thirds of RFP families. SHARE also had the highest proportion of female participants.

Caring, Kind, Spiritually Motivated People at CHUM

At CHUM, volunteers have formed friendships and drawn connections with one another through their volunteer work at the food shelf both through interaction and a shared sense of religious values. CHUM operates in a manner similar to the corporatist model defined by Fyfe and Milligan (2003): volunteers are trained and overseen by a volunteer coordinator, much of the financing comes from government sources, and the organization employs case managers and social workers to deliver material support for those in need. Because the food shelf is open five days a week and is always soliciting f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• The Struggle to Build Community and Feed Society
• Food Security, the Industrial Food System, and Community in the US
• Creating Community and Empowerment in Community-based Food Programs
• The Emerging Alternative Economies in Community-based Food Programs
• Neoliberalism and the Porous Continuum of Care for the Food Insecure
• Looking for Paths to Food Access and Solidarity
• Bibliography
• Index