Paper short abstract:

Local government support of community food assistance projects in Amsterdam Noord makes food aid and informal care work intersect with formal welfare. Funding and accountability ties endanger these projects' otherwise lively capacity for performing in-/formal care work.

Paper long abstract:

As food insecurity in Europe has risen in the last 15 years, food assistance has burgeoned. Whereas this has often been approached as a symptom of structural inequalities, alternative perspectives shed light on the potential of community food assistance (CFA) to contribute to redress these inequalities. This can be strengthened in more-than-food programs, where CFA recipients are actively supported by public institutions, e.g. by social and health workers. However, such more-than-food assistance has been widely understudied. Our research thus aims to fill this gap by tracing the development and role of CFA projects in the historically deprived city district of Amsterdam Noord, and the way that the local government has supported them. We build on interviews with 25 people and participatory observation. We found that, on the back of Covid-19, economic, energy and housing crises, CFA projects developed as unmissable loci where food aid intersects with informal and formal social and health work. Simultaneously, these projects are fraught with insecure food supply, locations and subsidies, and often coordinated by volunteers who themselves are in physically and financially vulnerable positions. The public funding these projects receive increases their ‘formality’ and lines of accountability towards public institutions, whereas it is precisely their informality that supports their care work wider than ‘just’ food, e.g. by attracting those that often live under the radar of institutions. We conclude that public support should avoid bureaucratizing the projects’ otherwise lively capacity for performing in-/formal care work.