Professional Volunteerism
Tracing the construction of morality in Dutch Foodbanks
Master thesis Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Track: Applied Ethnography
(GSSS department)
Roos Scholten 11669233 roosscholten93@hotmail.com Amsterdam, June 2018 Word count: 21.580
Supervisor: Second and Third readers:
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Declaration: I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy
[http://student.uva.nl/msca/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
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Abstract
How do we deal with problems that emerge from social inequality and which ways of solving
these problems are considered appropriate in our time? These are questions that are widely researched in the discipline of Development Anthropology and at the same time, these are questions contemplated by the members of governmental and non-governmental organizations dealing with these problems. One way of dealing with social inequality is through charitable help of humanitarian NGOs. Increasingly, scholars argue, these NGOs are becoming an institutionalized part of society, thereby legitimizing charity institutions in taking over the state’s duty of care (Ferguson 1990, Ortner 2017). At the same time, one can claim, this poses a paradox: how does one secure and institutionalize a reliable network that practices charity and giving, something that is in its core a voluntary and thus non-committed practice? I follow volunteers of the Dutch Foodbank. They are the ones who translate the NGO’s statuses of both charity organisation and institution in their daily practice of offering help. By giving meaning to and making sense of their work, they wave charitable feelings of compassion and economic understandings of commitment into a moral and credible story of their
volunteerism. In this thesis, I argue that volunteers can on the one hand be predominantly directed towards a morality of compassion and charity, in which clients’ needs and problems are prioritized. On the other hand, the actions of volunteers can also be directed towards the institutionalized morality of objectivity, in which a volunteer steers towards the value-free commitment to Foodbank practices. As in these interactions volunteers are constantly confronted with a mismatch in the aim to secure the NGO’s continuity and the aim to
acknowledgme the problem of social inequality, their actions in daily encounters with clients can be seen as micropolitical acts in which they are forced to prioritize one of these aims.
Key words: Foodbank, volunteerism, institutionalization, moral economy, Netherlands
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Solidarity Fridge, Placed next to one of the Foodbanks by a charity organisation called Weggeefwinkel i.e. give-shop .
(picture taken by author, January 2018, the Netherlands)
The notice on the fridge states:
“Congratulations! You have found the city’s one and only Solidarity Fridge! The aim is simple: [the fridge] contains food from those who have too much food for those who do not have enough.”
[...]
[The rules for the handling of the food in the fridge are then listed, these mainly consist of food safety considerations.]
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Acknowledgements
In November 2017, I got involved in a local food initiative that is offering a free meal every Tuesday evening. I became friends with Frans, the founder of this initiative. He is the man whom I owe a large part of my network to and who has helped me to establish great
friendships and valuable connections to a lot of people in the city where I conducted research. I would like to thank him for his contributions to the research and his tireless support and dedication to the meal initiative. He created a group that carries a lot of meaning to its members and I want to thank him for including me and making me feel at home. Besides Frans, I would like to thank the coordinators of the official and unofficial Foodbank sites where I was able to involve in daily practices, ask questions and conduct interviews.
I have felt very welcome and I feel that I have become part of a community. Furthermore, the support of the board members of the national Federation of Foodbanks and their offer to conduct research with an applied character has been of great importance and I am grateful for the opportunities and insights it has provided. Additionally, the open attitude of the Poverty Coalition towards my presence during events has been of great value to the extension of my gaze and I feel indebted to them. I want to underscore my admiration for their tireless efforts to politically engage with the problem of social inequality in the city. Moreover I want to express gratitude to all the Foodbank volunteers and clients that have told me stories about their lives and who have shared their opinions on issues close to their heart. I would like to thank my brother, Michiel, for his improvements to my English spelling and taking Dutch-ness out of this thesis during the final weeks of my writing. Here, the help of the other participants of the Applied Ethnography track, particularly Nick, and Anna, has also been of great value. Their valuable feedback and support has also meant a lot to me. Finally I would like to thank my supervisor, Milena Veenis, for her honest and straightforward feedback and her emotional support. Her heart-felt dedication to my research and interest in my topic have been crucial to the course of the research and finalization of this thesis.
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A project of critique seeks not to destroy its object, but to explain the dynamics of its optimism and exclusions.
- Lauren Berlant (2004, p. 5)
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Content
Introduction 8
Chapter one.
The ideology of donations, volunteers and no profits 18
Structuring after gifting 19
Institutionalizing morality 22
The professional volunteer 23
Admission and a governmental support network 24
The morality of objectiveness 26
Chapter two.
Establishing value for volunteers 29
Civil society and its charity function 30
The glorification of participation 34
The political climate for volunteerism 35 Glorified productivity or breaking bubbles 36
Chapter three.
Aiming for equality 41
A moral economy in action 41
Arguments for redistribution 45
Arbitrary distance and ground-shaking encounters 48
Conclusion 52
Bibliography 57
Appendix
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Introduction
Looking around, I see people happily chatting in the tiny kitchen, crammed in at the table with all volunteers while rolling cigarettes, drinking coffee, and discussing their daily
business. It feels like I am at my neighbours house for a chat, but in fact we are only taking a break from a task the volunteers set out to do every week: filling food packages with the surplus from local supermarkets to help poor people from their own neighbourhood getting their lives back together. It is clear that this is not a simple task as there is always a lot of work to be done and limited time and people. However, the volunteers are committed to their tasks; an important one, the coordinator Karen1 states, which she is happy to demonstrate. In her view, the charity provided by the volunteers is beneficial in several ways. It provides volunteers with a place to be and a purpose; it counters food waste; it is beneficial to clients receiving products for free or for very little money; it helps build a community within the most vulnerable groups of society; it uncovers hidden poverty in the Netherlands, and it helps establish a strong civil society through the act of helping each other. She substantiates her statements by naming all the things she and her volunteers are doing for the community, involving much more than simply providing food packages to clients.
I started off as a normal volunteer. Steadily we started to professionalize this
Foodbank and we attracted bigger and steady donors such as Albert Heijn. I have put a lot of effort into it and we have grown much bigger since we started in 2006. Back then, poverty was not much spoken about much in this neighbourhood. Slowly the extent to which poverty was present became visible. At a certain point, my husband and I decided that we were going to make a fulltime commitment. We used to have a little charity shop as well, right over there, at the end of the street. Just like the one we are starting up right now, actually. A couple of years ago, fewer and fewer costumers came to the shop and it was not profitable anymore, so it became a storage room. But this new place is going to be all right. We have got our house full with all of this, well.. we call it non-food, nice stuff which we receive from donors. We receive pans, clothing, you name it. Next week we are opening the pop-up store, so I can finally clean out my house. It is filled to the ridge with all that stuff. Some rooms I cannot even enter anymore! So we are selling that and the proceeds we can use to make the
1 All names in this thesis are anonimized.
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Foodbank better. Also, soon we are going to start with the market sale again. We sell stuff for very little money and we also do lotteries as we do at retirement homes, you know, not expensive. We just want to help out, bringing about some social contact. Karen situates the Foodbank as a central hub of charity, helping people out of an isolated position by bringing them into a network of charity. The local character of the activities is helpful in creating community and forging connections between neighbours. The
professionalization and expansion of the Foodbank serves to improve and, above all, secure the continuity of this charity network. Seemingly, we would have stumbled upon a win-win situation if it were not for a central paradox to be uncovered within this construction of charity. As charity is based on the practice of giving, it is considered a voluntary act. This leads to the problem: how does one secure a reliable network that practices giving, something that is in its core a voluntary and thus non-committed practice? Following this, how then do volunteers, as figureheads for the voluntary character of this charity, understand their roles in a context where impersonal professionalism and personal care are paradoxically portrayed as two sides of the same coin? And more importantly: what does that mean for the position of their clients?
I have found these to be intriguing questions as they touch upon a profoundly humanitarian issue: how do we deal with problems that emerge from social inequality and which ways of solving these problems are considered appropriate in our time? These are questions that have been widely researched in the discipline of Development Anthropology (Fisher 1997: 440). At the same time these are questions contemplated by the members of organizations dealing with these problems on a daily basis. It appeared as a great opportunity to me, when I found out that de Vereniging van Voedselbanken Nederland, meaning the Dutch Federation of Foodbanks, had stated an interest in anthropological research.The Dutch Federation of Foodbanks is the national organisation that coordinates the connection between local Foodbanks and distribution centres, assuring an efficient cooperation. Furthermore, it collects additional funding for all the independent distribution centres nationwide.
The board of the Dutch Federation of Foodbanks came to me with a question. They observed a shift in the manners in which other European Foodbanks organized their
distribution, as consequence of the critique that previous systems of food redistribution were not inclusive2 enough, i.e. including clients’ needs into food distribution. They wanted to
2 Even though one can interpret this term to mean the inclusion of certain social groups, here this term is used by
Foodbank board members to indicate the inclusion of clients in the process of redistribution by offering them a choice in food instead of handing them a pre-fixed package.
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know how to implement this same change towards a more inclusive practice in the
Netherlands and how to make it successful? What one sees in other European countries is a gradual change towards social supermarkets where clients are asked to pick their own
products from a supermarket-like product range of donated products instead of offering a pre-fixed package. In the Netherlands this change can also be observed in some places, but a wide-spread implementation has not yet been realized. The board member of the national Federation of Foodbanks I have spoken to expressed his view on the central difficulty. He told me that a top-down implementation of social supermarkets would be impossible; the
motivation to change needs to come from local coordinators themselves as all Foodbanks are locally founded civil initiatives3. Acknowledging this difficulty and for the benefit of an applied research, I translated their original question into: what needs to happen to convince local Foodbanks to get involved in these more inclusive practices directed towards the independence of clients and what should these practices ideally look like? However interesting these question are, they were posed rather late in the research. Even though the Dutch Federation of Foodbanks had expressed their interest in anthropological research at the beginning of the research process, it was not until two weeks before the end of the data gathering period that I was able to get an appointment for discussing their interests and questions. This meant that I was forced to combine my own theoretical interests with the practical question posed by the Foodbank. The humanitarian significance of both questions makes this thesis into a theoretically as well as organisationally and publicly relevant search after the dynamics of Dutch NGO practices and its outcome on problems of social inequality.
In Development Anthropology, the discussion on the outcome of humanitarian NGO practices is basically divided into two main arguments. The first argument states that most humanitarian initiatives are unintendedly doing more harm than good through the
depoliticizing effects of their practices. James Ferguson (1990) was one of the first
anthropologists to take on this critical view of humanitarian NGOs in his seminal work on development in Lesotho. He describes the risk for NGOs to become part of what he calls the ‘anti-politics machine’ of development. His argument is based on the two manners in which poverty can be defined, either in terms of its measurable features (unemployment, debts, malnutrition, etc.) or in terms of its structural production (discrimination, high unemployment due to a lack of jobs, unbalanced low wages). Increasingly, Ferguson states, development becomes centred around technical solutions to the visible outcomes of humanitarian problems.
3
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When stated that these solutions can be provided by NGOs, the political and societal
structures that have produced the problems are overlooked. What follows is that the practices of NGOs depoliticize humanitarian issues, constructing solutions as separate from the societal production (Ferguson 1990: 251).
Other anthropologists have also argued that NGOs and humanitarian organisations inherently cause depoliticizing effects (Broch-Due 1995, Feldman and Ticktin 2010, Ortner 2017). Sherry Ortner (2017) explains how depoliticization has been made almost inescapable through the neoliberal landscape in which NGOs must operate. As the climate in which NGOs operate depends on market working, it becomes difficult to structurally address problems. An NGO can, for example, receive donations from a company that upholds poverty through a lowest-wage-possible policy. Here an NGO converges to a policy that structurally produces the problem the NGO claims to fight. By avoiding the political discussion, one can be seen as purportedly repairing the damages of an economy that is built around structural inequality (Ortner 2017: 531).
Connected to this argument, several authors have studied the involvement of the state in this process of depoliticizing poverty, arguing that the state’s encouragement and
glorification of volunteerism can be seen as depoliticizing the issue of poverty (Hyatt 2001, Berlant 2004, Muehlebach 2013, Muehlebach 2014). Andrea Muehlebach (2013, 2014) argues that not only the emergence of NGOs but also the closely linked emergence of an individualized civil responsibility to ‘do good’ through volunteering can be seen as a result of a neoliberalizing state. As people become increasingly alienated by an individualized society, which causes an alleged decrease of community values, an increase of volunteerism can be observed as a moralized counter-movement against this trend. She argues that much state policy and educational institutions are increasingly adopting a Catholicized moral logic in order to promote volunteerism as a part of the cultivation of the emotive self (Muehlebach 2013: 459). In this way, she argues, state institutions are implicitly promoting the use of a non-paid workforce for the task of care through a moralized discourse of love and
volunteerism. Susan Brin Hyatt (2001) analyzes the relation between NGOs, volunteering and the state in her research after voluntary self-help networks of disadvantaged communities in the United States. She argues that an increased state promotion of volunteerism and care causes an extended grip on disadvantaged communities in the United States through the portrayal of volunteering as an obligation of citizenship. She shows how the government of the United States is increasingly promoting so-called ‘self-help networks’. These are voluntary organisations from local disadvantaged communities that help people from their
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own community to integrate and engage in society, thereby serving the development of these communities. This promotion of volunteerism is done through the discourse of emancipation: as one has the ability to help oneself, we should not want to implement paternal top-down change, but change should come from bottom-up initiatives. However, she argues, these networks of support already existed and are merely becoming institutionalized and based on more impersonal ties, conflicting with pre-existing networks based on kinship and friendship (Hyatt 2001: 216). She argues that this state promotion of volunteerism is diminishing the significance of the non-institutionalized volunteerism of informal networks in disadvantaged communities as well as promoting volunteerism as part of an institutionalized civil
responsibility. Hereby she argues that the state’s end of creating an extremely low-paid workforce is played out (Hyatt 2001: 228). Both authors portray the modern state as actively steering towards putting responsibility on civil society for problems of social inquality, showing an increase in volunteerism to be depoliticizing poverty as it indirectly discards the state of its responsibility of care and upholds the problem of poverty.
Continuing to the second argument, there have also been authors proclaiming that NGOs do not necessarily need to cause depoliticizing effects as tasks are performed by either volunteers or employees in the interaction with recipients. Being involved in a human relation means that volunteers have the ability to act in ways that can politicize the issue of poverty as well (Fisher 1997, Curtis 2010, Bornstein 2013, Muehlebach 2013, Mittermaier 2014). As an example, Jennifer Curtis (2010) shows how the NGO she studied has enabled people from a poor neighbourhood in Northern Ireland to congregate and pose political demands for
improving their situation. In this same line of thought, Andrea Muehlebach (2013) states that acts of volunteers involved in NGO practices are primarily directed towards depoliticizing effects through their adherence to a moralized logic as produced and reproduced in
organisational, state, and public discourse. On the other hand, she acknowledges that volunteers are people with the ability to engage in parallel narratives by, for example, being involved in demonstrations against government policies which are structurally producing the problems volunteers are temporarily solving. Furthermore, she argues that the acts of
volunteers are not necessarily built on a static, paternalistic image of charity. Helping others can also be enacted in more equal encounters. In her view, volunteers are able to provide more politicized help through a relationship which is based on mutual understanding and solidarity with personal acknowledgement of the societal production of a client’s problems (Muehlebach 2013: 462). Adding to this discussion, Erica Bornstein (2013) describes how volunteers at a Zimbabwean NGO are able to circumvent a neoliberal logic in the
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legitimization of their motives for ‘doing good’. They thereby open up the possibility to act in more politicized ways through adhering to a Christian moral obligation for structural change, rather than framing voluntary involvement as a moralized civil responsibility (Bornstein 2013: 139). Amira Mittermaier (2014) makes a similar argument stating that the volunteers of an Islamic NGO in Egypt often overcome the creation of inequality between them and their recipients by believing themselves to be enacting Allah’s will. Thereby they are framing both volunteer and recipient as equal human beings in the eyes of Allah. The underlying
recognition of interdependence and radical equality through religious understandings then politicizes the position of the recipient by acknowledging the societal inequality that has brought them into the situation in which they need help (Mittermaier 2014: 527).
Adding to the discussion on the outcomes of NGO practices as portrayed in the literature of Development Anthropology, I use the classical anthropological concept of moral economy as introduced by the English historian E.P. Thompson (1971) and elaborated upon by anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott (1976). This concept is used to describe the manners in which people understand and justify reasonable and unreasonable behaviour in economic context, thereby understanding the righteousness of behaviour in relation to economic acts such as giving, employing, or buying. E.P. Thompson (1971) argues that the acceptability of economic behaviour depends on the social rules as constructed in society, such as reciprocity, and mutual obligations and equal gain. James C. Scott (1976) researched why people in different socio-economic positions use different justifications for what morality is in the economic sphere. He argued for a specified view of morality, including the socio-economic position and class of the actors involved. He substantiates his argument by framing peasant uprisings in Southeast Asia as a form of defending one’s own subsistence, therefore legitimizing an alternative view on moral economic behaviour in which rioting can be deemed morally acceptable. Using this concept offers the opportunity to analyze local actors, such as clients and volunteers at Foodbanks, as political and moral subjects using their understandings of morality as justification for their behaviour in an economic context (Scott 1976: 4). At the same time, using the concept of moral economy implies the assumption that morality is embedded in the social, political and economic context in which actors move (Palomera and Vetta 2016: 6). In other words, by deconstructing economic morality, the researcher is enabled to link economic behaviour to societal structures at large rather than contain it to spheres outside of the market or to micro-economic contexts (Palomera and Vetta 2016: 16). The concept of moral economy holds one major criticism. Using this concept forms a risk of a romanticizing the studied economy. Authors are easily tempted to frame
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actions in a positive or negative way by portraying an image of exploitation and defending social justice instead of objectively describing and analyzing behaviour, understandings and categorizations. As I am conducting Applied Anthropology, I try to be as reflexive as
possible, keeping in mind the pitfall of portraying a story of exploitation. I aim to stay within the scope of a describing and analyzing observed categorizations and decisions made by interlocutors to guard the theoretical relevance of this research.
When returning to the central paradox of this thesis, one can start to see how intriguing the study of a moral economy can be.The difficulty for volunteers is to unite the two
seemingly contradicting identities of the Foodbank when expressing one’s motivations. Where the Foodbank as a charity organization is dependent on the voluntary compassionate feelings of community members, as an institution it is aiming to assure continuity. This, in the eyes of many, requires a more professionalized and profit-driven logic in order to survive in a neoliberalized society. In performing their identity as a volunteer, they use understandings of which behaviour and motivations are morally right and credible, and which are wrong in the context of the Foodbank’s economy. These understandings are what I call the volunteers’ moral economy. This moral economy is not a fixed set of rules stating an uncontested notion of right and wrong. It is constructed out of a variety of sources such as personal experiences, the moral rules of the organisation, interactions with others and more, as I will expand upon in the coming chapters. I have considered to adapt the concept of moral economy by making it plural, showing that there is a variety of interpretations and acts constantly at play as
volunteers are dealing with a paradox of the seemingly incompatible motivations of compassion and profit. However, my aim is to uncover how the Foodbank’s main moral economy is constructed and contested, highlighting the existence of alternative interpretations within a strong singular narrative.At the same time, I argue that these practices of giving meaning and constructing morality are not neutral; they are a form of politics. In my view, politics are not only one’s conservative, liberal or progressive vote. In this thesis, I uncover politics in their most quotidian form by showing volunteers’ understandings of societal problems and their influence on these problems in everyday decisions and interactions. Acknowledging inequality in a client’s individual case or the understanding of a client’s powerlessness can be seen as a political act based on compassionate feelings and a subjective stance towards the problem of poverty.Even denying the existence of politics in a place like the Foodbank and moralizing a value free distribution can be seen as a political act if one understands that this means that one is taking a conservative stance by not wanting to change the way things are done.
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In this thesis, I follow the political and moral dynamics of Foodbank interactions, aiming to answer the question: how do Foodbank volunteers act upon their paradoxical position as part of a charity institution in their interaction with clients? Hereby I portray volunteers as micropolitical performers of the Foodbanks moral economy, studying their moral categorizations and understandings.
I conducted a ten-week field research in the period between January and March 2018 at three official Foodbank and one unofficial foodbank site in a Dutch city environment. The unofficial foodbank is a local church initiative, which distributes free food and clothing weekly. I have chosen to include this site in the research as it provided a useful and relatively non-institutionalized counterpart to the official sites. Being an official Foodbank means that one has chosen to conform to the organisation of the national Federation of Foodbanks. This is the organization I have mentioned before as a national congregation of local NGOs offering food packages under approximately the same conditions. The Foodbank was founded in 2002 and it started off as a single small distribution centre in Rotterdam, which has now grown into 168 Foodbanks and 500 distribution centres nationwide. Weekly, 40.000 food packages are handed out by 11.000 volunteers to approximately 132.500 people in the Netherlands.4 In 2008 all local Foodbanks united into the Federation of Dutch Foodbanks, which precipitated overarching rules and guidelines for coordinating the distribution to be established.5 One must comply to strict income standards in order to receive food help. The national Federation of Foodbanks holds a standard of 130 euros a month with 85 euros extra for each member of the household as a maximum income after the deduction of fixed charges and debts.6 The
Foodbank’s incomes come from local and national fundraisers, local governmental funds, and private donations. I have chosen to conduct the fieldwork in a city environment rather than in a rural setting, as cities are often portrayed as showing less social coherence and social control7 (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 2018: 10). Therefore, the creation social ties in communities through the compassionate feelings of humanitarian work should be more visible in city settings.
During the fieldwork period, I have used several methods for obtaining data that expose the manner in which volunteers attach meaning to their work and which moral understandings are at play. At the same time, I have looked for data portraying volunteers’ and clients’ understandings of the humanitarian problems they are dealing with. I have used
4https://voedselbankennederland.nl/ (last visited on 12/6/2018) 5https://voedselbankennederland.nl/historie/ (last visited on 16/6/2018) 6
https://voedselbankennederland.nl/kom-ik-in-aanmerking-voor-een-pakket/ (last visited on 12/6/2018)
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participant observation to observe how social relations are played out at the field sites. I have combined this with informal conversation to understand which meanings are attached to each manner of interacting. Furthermore, I have used in-depth interviews to find out how
volunteers as well as clients frame the relation between poverty, the Foodbank and
volunteering. Focus groups have proved to be useful in establishing what is moral client and volunteer behaviour. The questions ‘what are important characteristics for volunteers?’ and ‘how should one interact with clients?’ proved not only useful as a conversation starter, but have also been an important analytical tool during research by means of their insight in moral argumentations. Finally, and importantly, small talk, gossip and joking has provided me with a lot of valuable material on how volunteers attach meaning to their work by being able to differentiate oneself from another.
During my research, I have experienced some serious doubts and setbacks. The main issue that initially caught my worry was the fact that I felt unable to connect to clients as this group is often subject of research causing a heightened awareness and protection against inquisitive people like me. This is not only an observation, but I have also often been warned for this by volunteers and other researchers during the research. For example, within
Foodbanks itself many rules are enforced to restrict interaction with clients for the sake of the protection of their privacy, as I will later elaborate on. At the same time, I encountered my own ethical boundaries when I needed to reconcile my ‘powerful’ position as a researcher and at times volunteer with the knowledge that it would be difficult to actively give something back to the client interlocutors. Even though I have had some interviews and many informal conversations with clients, it has been extremely difficult to receive useful information. Often, answers were quite superficial and emphasized how nice volunteers usually are. They mainly criticized what was inside the package rather than the manner in which it was distributed. Initially, I thought this would restrict me in what I could say on the relationship between clients and volunteers. However, I can still contemplate on how the relationship is formed locally at the site through the thorough participant observation I have done. I place emphasis on how this relationship is imagined and created through volunteering and the manner in which Foodbanks are organized, rather than placing the emphasis on the relationship as such.
Another problem I have faced in the field is that the research has been very informal at times, which sometimes led me and my informants to forget my position as a researcher. As there is always a lot of work to be done, I sometimes got caught up in being part of the volunteering team instead of being a researcher. Making notes reminded people of my position, but it was often difficult to write down the things that were really interesting to me
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as they felt to be very personal and often they did not comply with the image the volunteers had of themselves. I feel that, even though the volunteers were aware of my project, it was difficult to make people understand what was of interest to me and what the consequences could be for them, placing myself in a difficult ethical position when considering the issue of informed consent. I have, to my best efforts, tried to do honour to my interlocutors’ opinions and positions and I have anonimized names and places to reduce the uncertainty which accompany these issues of consent. Finally, I feel it is important to state that the applied character of the research has had an influence on my own position in the field. Interlocutors expressed to feel independent from the national Federation of Foodbanks, explaining that they were not concerned with my connection to them. Therefore, I feel that this implication of applied research has not had major influence on the content of my data. Even though the connection between the national Federation of Foodbanks and the local Foodbanks is limited, the information I have gathered can still affect the relation between them. On the one hand, the national Federation states to have little impact on what happens locally. However, as they only have a limited information about local practices, findings potentially have consequences for my interlocutors. The aim of the research is not to provide the national Federation of Foodbanks with a story of the good and bad aspects of local practices, but to raise awareness of the mechanisms behind Foodbank volunteering and its consequences for the issue of poverty.
Before I start setting out the stage on which clients and volunteers interact, it is important to clarify and substantiate my choice for the use of the word client. In the city where I have conducted fieldwork, the word participant was used for the people receiving a Foodbank package. However, as in anthropology the word participant is often used for one’s interlocutors, I decided to use the word client instead. This word is used by the board and the people of the national Federation of Foodbanks. Also, as it ascribes more rights to the people receiving Foodbank packages, I prefer to use this term. Note, however, that this term is rarely, if ever, used by any of my interlocutors.
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Chapter one.
The ideology of donations, volunteers and no profits
Starting my search for the moral economy of Foodbank practices, I am first introduced at a unofficial foodbank situated in a church close to the city centre. I am interested in the
motivations of their volunteers for involving in volunteerism and in the argumentation behind the decision not to join the overarching network of official Foodbanks. My first interaction proved to be an insightful one, raising questions concerning practices involved when performing moral economic understandings.
I am an hour early and there is already a line of people waiting in front of the iron gate obstructing the access to the small concrete garden of the community centre. I am looking for Chris. He is the pastor of the church where food and clothing is handed out every Saturday at noon. He told me to just pass the line and walk through the door. As the gate looks pretty solid, especially with a line of people waiting in front of it, I walk up and down the line looking for a different access. “The gate is open meissie8”, one of the older men at the front of the line says to me and he demonstrates it by pulling the latch down and opening the door. “Thank you!” I reply and I sneak past the line into the garden while a woman mutters to her friend: “no-one likes to wait in line, but with a bit of decency you would at least not cut it.” Deciding not to let that comment bother me, I quickly go inside to meet Chris whom
immediately starts my tour. He tells me that they receive the food from the official Foodbank further down the street and the clothes from personal donations. Also, their team made the decision not to perform financial checks on their clients as is done at other Foodbanks, or as Chris puts it: “our distribution is based on trust”. Laughingly he says:
Once there was this township official and she was against us giving this stuff away for free. She thought we needed to ask for money, like 5 or 10 cents, to teach poor people that nothing in life is for free. Now I think of it, she looked a lot like Rita Verdonk9! You know, we are only offering the people a chance to find back their place in society by helping them out where we can. So we hand out food and clothing, but one can also come and pray with us. Furthermore, we can connect our clients to other authorities if they want and we have even helped people to get an education, for free! We really
8 Dutch word meaning ‘missy’ or ‘little girl’ 9
Rita Verdonk is a Dutch rightwing politician who has been the image of conservative policy from approximately 2006 to 2012 in the Netherlands.
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follow the three central values of this church. We help materially, spiritually and relationally.
In a short explanation of the practices and motivations of Chris’s Foodbank, he expands on his ideas of what he thinks a moral distribution of free products should look like. His main aim, as he states it, is to offer help to people who have lost grip on their lives either
financially, spiritually or relationally. According to Chris, this can only be done on the premise of trust, which for him does not match with the performance of an income check or with the to him pedantic implementation of small payment for their service. Emphasizing that this is only one possible argumentation for the morality of practices and rules in the context of a charity organisation, the question arises: according to what understandings of the problems of and the solutions to poverty does Chris make these choices? Furthermore, why do official Foodbanks offer a different moral understanding in which, for example, the implementation of income checks is not seen as problematic? In this chapter, I trace which choices for
structuring the organisation are made in official Foodbanks and within the national Federation of Foodbanks and I look for the moral argumentation of their acceptance or rejection. I aim to uncover how the basis of the moral economy of Foodbanks is constructed and I look for the way in which ideas of money, rules and morality meet, conflict and alter throughout the organisation.
Structuring after gifting
Tracing which moral values are promoted is interesting for starting to understand the moral economy as promoted by the Foodbank. Is one supposed to perform gifting as a manner of temporarily alleviating poverty or is one supposed to actively search for the structural problems that produce the problem of poverty and uncover these? Or could there be a morality that covers both? I am looking for the intersection between possibilities,
dependencies and morality: what is the moral argumentation behind organisational decisions? At the same time, I aim to present an image of the climate in which practices of including clients’ needs must be implemented, considering the national Federation of Foodbank’s aim to move towards the establishment of social supermarkets. I start in the office of the national Federation of Foodbanks, looking for an answer to the question which moral guidelines are offered by the Foodbank and how their justness is argued for. I am invited by one of the members of the board, Harry. During our conversation he points towards the banner on other side of his office portraying all kinds of logos, saying: “we are not the only Foodbank in Europe you know. However, we are unique in the sense that everything operates on volunteers
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here in the Netherlands. No other Foodbank in Europe functions exclusively on volunteers” [emphasis added]. With a pause in his speech he lets the weight of his statement sink in.
You see, we receive everything for free, so I believe we cannot justify to start paying people [and ask clients for money]. There are other organisations in the Netherlands that do do it. I think there is one in IJsselstein, a sort of supermarket where people who cannot afford it receive the products for free and the people who can afford it pay a little money. But this place receives the products for free and they function solely on volunteers...’ [emphasis added]
Reading over this statement it is clear that the last sentence is not finished; if this organisation would ask money for their donated products, whereas all the work is done by volunteers, one would be earning money from a charity product that is received for free and that would be immoral. Based on an understanding of moral economic behaviour, it suggests that recipients of Foodbank help need to be protected from the possibility of exploitation. In this case, it means that Harry argues it to be immoral to impose a revenue model in an organisation that is dependent on donations, saying that the exclusive use of volunteers is the only defendable organisational choice to be made. In fact, this moral image of money is a guiding principle for many rules within the organisation of the Foodbank, as depicted in the core values of the national Federation of Foodbanks, communicated on their website.
Figure 1: The core values on the official website of the national Federation of Foodbanks 10
10 Source: https://voedselbankennederland.nl/missie-en-doelstellingen/ (last visited on 19/4/2018) A literal
translation of the core values of the Dutch Federation of Foodbanks as communicated on their website: 1. We work exclusively with volunteers
2. We distribute food donated by others 3. We provide exclusively free food
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In these rules,not only the sole use of volunteers is advertised, but also the Foodbank’s exclusive use of donated products, the fact that products must be given away for free, and their need for an open administration.11 By stating these rules, the national Federation of Foodbanks does not leave open the possibility for people within their own organisation to make money at the expense of the more vulnerable people involved in the transaction. The two final core values serve neutrality and objectiveness as moral values, overarching the entire political and religious spectrum, and claiming not to involve with politics of any kind. Harry explained the moral argumentation of these rules as well:
Not so long ago I was at the rotary club and they did not understand why I put my precious time in this volunteerism. They told me that it is poor people’s own fault that they ended up in poverty and that they need to live off almost no money. That is what you get, they said. I knew I was not going to convince them, but that was not the point. We do not aim to structurally solve the problem or to educate people, we aim to give hungry people food. Besides, poverty is invisible these days. One cannot even see it. It might be that the neighbour of the rotary club guy is ZZPer12 and lives in a beautiful house, wears the same clothing, but also needs to go to the Foodbank.
Harry explains how the aim of the Foodbank consists of helping people in rough times. By acknowledging his inability to solve the problem of poverty, he also offers the opportunity for everyone to be helped, regardless of the origin of one’s problems. Volunteers do not need to get involved in the causes of clients’ problems; the aim is to stay neutral and objective. I argue that this view supports a depoliticized practice in which volunteers are not supposed to politicize the issue of poverty by uncovering its structural production. They should not get involved in these problems, as this involvement is seen as excluding certain clients. Following a moral economic perspective, the question arises: how are these understandings of morality implemented in local Foodbanks and in which ways is it either countered or reproduced by volunteers?
5. We distribute food as fair as possible
6. We are neutral and objective (‘citizens for citizens’) 7. We are transparent in our accountability
11 Contrastingly, Sociaal Winkelpunt (a social supermarket in the Belgian city of Antwerp) is based on a very
different ideology. In the first section stating their mission on their website they write: ‘Sociaal Winkelpunt wants to make emergency aid superfluous... It seems convenient to receive free food, but the price one pays flows directly from ones self-esteem.’
http://www.sociaalwinkelpunt.be/missie_en_visie/8-achtergrondinformatie (last visited on 13/6/2018)
12
Dutch term (abbreviation): ZZP = Zelfstandige zonder personeel. Freelance workers who work for different employers, often project based.
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Institutionalizing morality
Not long after I started my research, I found out that there are alternative ways to look at the morality of Foodbank practices. Brenda, an anti-poverty activist, expressed her concerns:
I do not agree with churches helping all those people. It is not doing them right. They use the same criteria as the government13, so they are just recreating the same system. They should have built up a different system from their Christian values, right? If you look at the Bible, it teaches people to love ones neighbours. Then they could say: the food waste is for everyone. Anyone can come and most people of course will not come, only the people who truly need it. It has a very double morality and we just act like that is okay.
Here Brenda depicts the institutionalized character of the Foodbank as problematic according to her own moral standards. She claims that following the governmental system is not doing right to the people needing help. For her, the rules of the Foodbank are not leaving space for mistakes in the governmental system to be repaired or at least filled. Brenda is offering a view that has been subscribed by several authors studying the practices of Dutch Foodbanks in a humanitarian perspective. They argue that the vague position of Foodbanks between charity organisation and institution causes a mixed image of their social responsibilities (Gabriëls 2013, van Doorn and Keinemans: 2017). One can either see the Foodbank as an institution with a responsibility to care or one can see the Foodbank as a charity-organisation with a voluntary will to care, portraying different moral understandings of Foodbank help as a right or a favourable act . The question arises: how do volunteers understand the morality of their social responsibilities?
I argue that institutionalization itself can be seen as a way to normalize and legitimize the mixing both images and moralities. Institutionalization is the process in which people’s acts are increasingly structured, which means that the process of uniting all local Foodbanks into the Federation of Dutch Foodbanks in 2008 and the drawing up of overarching rules and guidelines can be seen as a form of institutionalization. When patterns stay stable for a longer period of time and people have accepted their underlying rules, their morality becomes legitimized in society and one can speak of an institution (Gabriëls 2013: 66-67). This resonates with the current anthropological view that moral economies should not be considered as stable frameworks where cultural and moral values and norms are static, but
13 Brenda is referring to the similarities between the income requirements as stated by Foodbanks and the income
and social requirements as held by the local government for affairs such as applying for social arrangements, causing certain people to fall between the lines not only at governmental institutions, but also with humanitarian organisations.
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different views of moral behaviour are in constant conflict, making moral economies a sphere of negotiation and change (Palomera and Vetta 2016: 12). One way of looking at the
perceived morality of Foodbank practices is therefore to look at the institutionalization of moral rules; how can this be observed within volunteers’ moral economy?
The professional volunteer
When sitting in his office, Peter provides me with a good example of the institutionalization of moral rules when he explains how his Foodbank has become the largest one in the area with its own network of donating supermarkets and over a hundred families whom rely on their services. That is not merely a simple act of charity, he accentuates while demonstrating his moral understanding, it is a responsibility and a commitment that cannot just be done by anyone:
What one sees is that there are more and more small initiatives popping up in the city. The question is: do you think that is a good development? From a humanitarian perspective, yes. From an organisational perspective, I say no. All my volunteers need to adhere to the standards of the Food Safety department. They at least need to follow a course in understanding how to handle the products and they need to do an exam as well.
When Peter explains how he and his team of volunteers make sure that the products are handled safely, he points out that everything involved in this practice is done professionally. He positions himself opposite smaller initiatives offering help in an ‘unprofessional’ way. At the same time Peter acknowledges that he needs to compromise his humanitarian aim as a consequence of his more institutionalized character. Without showing much regret over this perceived loss, he explains why his approach is the more responsible one.
If one starts to hand out food from the kitchenette in one’s students apartment, I would be mindful for the hygienic condition of your organisation... Now, if one were to look in our freezers, one will see that the meat we hand out is all provided with our own stickers. We receive meat that is on date from the supermarkets and we take the responsibility over it, saying that what we have received was frozen immediately. In this way it can still be used responsibly until two months after the expiration date. Referring to the professional handling of the received meat, Peter links morality in charitable acts to the ethos of protection. At the same time these Food Safety measurements serve another cause, Harry explains:
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Until recently, no Foodbank had the possibility to distribute meat. We started with a green certificate from the Voedsel en Waren Autoriteit14; they helped us with it. Now supermarkets dare to donate their meat as they freeze it themselves and the Foodbanks take the responsibility over it. The value of the packets has increased enormously as a consequence of that. It is the same with fresh vegetables. Supermarkets were also weary of that before, but Foodbanks are taking more and more responsibility and there is more trust.
Explaining how Food Safety is an issue that possibly holds back donors from donating food, Harry touches upon the other side of protection, namely accountability. On the one hand, Foodbank volunteers such as Peter portray the importance of Food Safety as central to the protection of clients, thereby giving off an image of moral considerations. On the other hand, Harry shows how their dependency on donors also puts pressure on their practices, as donors can withdraw from donating. This shows that securing Food Safety is not only done for moral reasons, but their dependency also forces them to take these kind of decisions. I argue that by focussing on the moral argument of protection, one covers up the manners in which the rule is formed by the Foodbank’s dependency on their donors. Following the argument made in the previous section, this morality then becomes institutionalized and normalized for volunteers. Where Peter until recently did not feel the need to put stickers proclaiming the safety of the product on his meat, he now uses this practice of protection to position himself as a moral actor against the immoral practices of small-scale humanitarian initiatives who do not ensure their safe practices. Other volunteers follow this morality, one that until recently was not present at Foodbanks. Here, we can see how the institutionalization of meat stickers as a Food Safety measurement implements a morality that partly follows from the Foodbank’s
dependency on donations. This is just one example of the institutionalization of morality; the following section shows how admission standards also influence the structuring of volunteers’ moral arguing.
Admission and a governmental support network
In the previous section, I have established that volunteers’ moral understandings partly consist of an institutionalized morality of protection, co-created in the relation between the
organisation and its donors. Apart from its connection to donors, the Foodbank is embedded
14 A green certificate is given after a test if a place that handles food meets the Food Safety and Hygiene laws as
stated by Food and Product Safety Authority. This certificate is renewed after a yearly control and regular unannounced check-ups are part of the procedure. https://www.voedselbankbest.nl/groene-certificaat/ (last visited on 16/6/2018)
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in a network of governmental institutions as well: how do these influence the volunteers moral economy? These influences become clear when we analyze the volunteers’ attitudes towards client’s admission procedures. “Admission requirements are necessary”, Harry explains: “if anyone could go to the Foodbank, it would simply not have enough food to help people that truly need it. There are several Foodbanks that need to work with waiting lists as they receive more applications than food. Through setting admission rules they are protecting clients from people aiming to misuse their service.”
The Foodbanks where I conducted fieldwork, collaborate with an objective third party performing income checks on clients. On the premise of the advice that flows from these checks, the coordinator decides if one is allowed access or not. I spoke to Susan, one of the women that performs income checks:
Susan: “Often when people come in, they have already had a check from the
Buurtteam15 and then they do not have to bring their papers. Once every three months, we check to see if the participant still qualifies for a food package and help them with their surcharges and debts.”
Roos: “Are you very strict when it comes to people hinging on the line?”
Susan: “Well, here they are quite strict on the border cases. For example, last month there was this woman who receives welfare. Now, her daughter of thirty moved in with her a couple of months earlier. Her daughter has a lot of debt and that is why her mother has difficulties to make ends meet. This is a case where we cannot help. Her daughter is responsible for herself; she is too old to qualify as one of her children. It is different with young kids, then the mother still has the responsibility of care.”
Susan shows how she as a volunteer feels forced to categorize new people into clients or non-clients, following a set of strict criteria. In this example, she follows one image of morality: strictly applying the rules that are shaped after an idea of honest distribution, scarcity and need. On the other hand, Susan also expresses the incentive of not adhering to the admission criteria in all cases:
When one does not meet the income requirements or when one’s income exactly matches the limit, one can stay. When one’s income is higher, we will take a look. At some Foodbanks, if one exceeds the requirements by five euros, one will immediately be sent away. We do not do that. Firstly we will look at one’s personal situation and
15 Buurtteams (Neighbourhood teams) are part of the local governments decentralizing strategy for social care. Buurtteams work together closely with health care organisations and other institutions offering formal or
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we also look at the person as a human being. Sometimes we need to consider how one ended up in such a bad situation and we need to look at someone’s behaviour.
Sometimes it does not make sense to help someone, but when one earns a bit too much and one truly needs our help we often make exceptions.
Comparing the two manners in which Susan justifies the categorization of people into clients and non-clients, she lays bare the tension between following a morality of measurability and standardized rules or following a more personalized and negotiated understanding of morality, based on the more arbitrary principle of deservedness. The Foodbank’s institutionalized character and its connection to governmental institutions is again putting volunteers in a difficult position. As clients are often referred to the Foodbank by a governmental institution such as a Buurtteam, they can be argued to be presented with the idea that one is qualified to receive a food package by meeting its income standards. Van Doorn and Keinemans argue that this idea provokes an argumentation of rights, understanding the moral economy of Foodbanks to serve social justice by helping the people who are entitled to it (2017: 103). This is leaving Susan and other volunteers in a challenging situation: when is one supposed to follow the principle of measurability and when is the principle of deservedness preferred?
Where volunteers are faced with the moral understanding of scarcity and needs on the one hand, they are also faced with the help-seekers’ understandings and expectations of their social responsibility. As Susan’s example shows, this argumentations of scarcity and rights are combined through the use of the concepts of protection and deservedness. She is one the one hand using an institutionalized morality, the one in which the connection to governmental institutions is providing clients with a strong argument of rights. Susan’s use of the concept of deservedness can here be seen as a manner to tone down the power of the client’s argument of rights. Instead of rights, she is giving off the image of favours in the admission check; Susan sometimes grants clients access who do not strictly adhere to the standards. On the other hand, she is also using the morality of measurability and objectiveness, thereby moralizing the protection of clients against other people’s misuse of their services. This means that she is at the same time performing and negating the morality as posed by the Foodbank’s
institutionalized value of objectivity and protection.
The morality of objectiveness
I have argued that the Foodbank influences volunteers’ moral understandings through the structuring of local practices by the implementation of overarching guidelines. I argued that rules are legitimized through their daily practice. By tracing their institutionalized
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argumentation, one can see how the moral economy of Foodbank volunteers is imbedded in the interdependent, but unequal relation between donors and the organisation. At the same time, one can see that volunteers are offered several moralities, either in the interest of the organisation or in the interest of clients. In order to shape their own understanding of a moral practicing of their tasks, they are forced to combine both views. This causes them to
constantly negotiate their understandings of morality in relation to their clients, coordinators, family, friends, strangers or other volunteers.
While we are still sitting in the office, Harry explains a bit more about this conflicting understanding of moral behaviour, differentiating between city and rural volunteers:
“especially in rural areas one often sees volunteers speaking about ‘their poor’. The community sense and the one-horse town feeling is of such proportion there that all
volunteers know the participants and want to care for them personally.” Understanding that in a small town people know each other personally, Harry expands on the volunteers’
motivations of care. Involving in Foodbank practices fulfils a desire to help, especially when living in a town where everyone knows each other and each other’s background. When he continues, he complicates this motivation showing how it conflicts with the central
responsibilities of Foodbank volunteers:
[Personal care] is a worrisome issue as it is not one’s task as a volunteer. One is supposed to be an objective actor, but that is difficult. There was a woman, a coordinator of a Foodbank, and whenever someone did not show up, she knew who that was and she would say to her husband that he should probably check up on this person. Maybe they knew this client was an alcoholic, so she thought: well, let us check if everything is alright! Of course that is not our intention; it goes far beyond one’s responsibilities [as a volunteer]. Therefore, we have the principle: three times a no show means that one is unsubscribed from the Foodbank, because apparently one does not need it as much as one claims.
Constructing personal care as a worrisome issue, Harry promotes the objective treatment of clients. In the coming chapters I will refer to this practice as the ‘morality of objectiveness’ or he ‘morality of continuity’, depending on the context in which the moral argumentation is made. In this example, Harry portrays the motivation of care to be in a conflicting relation to one’s responsibilities as a volunteer and with the Foodbank’s aim of offering value-free help. He offers a solution by restricting volunteers’ responsibilities of involving in discussions with clients by implementing strict, measurable rules for evaluating clients rights to a food
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I have shown that the understanding of the responsibilities, morality and meaning of Foodbank volunteerism are not uncontested. This means that volunteers can offer several lines of argumentation for portraying the meaning of their work and for their motivations to get involved. In the following chapter, I will therefore expand on the question: how do volunteers perceive the meaning of their work within this web of conflicting interpretations?
Figure 2: A donation of left-over Christmas boxes from the local bus company (Photo made by author, February 2018)
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Chapter two.
Establishing value for volunteers
We are back in the tiny, smoky kitchen when Karen suddenly remembers a good story from a few days ago at the other Foodbank. “We had such a severe case the other day, did we not girls?” Karen turns to me and Barbara, the other volunteer involved at both sites. “Remember that woman with the seven children? The one that just moved here?” “Ooh, right, the woman with the pram.” Barbara responds.
Yes! So she moved here from Almere, where she used to have an administrator16 whom just took everything from her. After a while she was only deeper in debt. Now, she moved here and to make matters worse her husband got ill, thyroid cancer. So he cannot work anymore, they have got immensely high hospital bills, and she also has seven little ones. I can tell you, I do not know how she does it. And never has anyone
ever handed something to her. So this week we had put some stuff together for her.
We still had those baby wipes and those little jars and I went out to get some diapers and an ointment. Well, you should have seen her! She had to sit down and she started to hyperventilate. I have been with the Foodbank for over twelve years now and I have never seen a case like this. Also, we had those coupons right? For fifty euro’s at the warehouse. So I had one left and I called Jennifer and I say: well, I have got this woman here and I would love to give her that card. So she says: yes that is fine, just let her sign.
“Yes, of course!” Barbara confirms as we all listen closely to what Karen is going to say next. “I say to her, just sign here, I have got something for you. So she signs and I say what it is and she starts crying. She never received anything in her life, never!” “And then she almost forgot what she came for, right Karen?” Barbara notes. “Ooh, yes, she almost walked away and then we said, you are forgetting the food! Well, we needed to grab a chair for her!” All volunteers nod in agreement, while Erna adds: “Those are the people one is doing it for.”
As we move on with the conversation, I contemplate on what has just been expressed. All volunteers seem to stress the importance of their work through the combination of their indispensability and the client’s honest emotional response of gratitude. Referring to the severity of the woman’s case, Karen uses a personalized story of a specific client to construct
16
The administrator, in Dutch bewindvoerder, is a person who helps people with debt or other money related problems to organize their finances.
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meaning for her practice of volunteering. The ‘goodness’ of Karen’s acts increases through the adding of personal details illustrating the client’s need. Other volunteers stress the
integrity of the extra effort Karen has put into it by recognizing the importance of help in this specific situation. Karen ignores the Foodbank’s morality of objectiveness by involving in the woman’s story and providing her with extra products. At the same time, the volunteers do not understand her behaviour to be immoral here and it is even understood as one of the reasons for involving in volunteering at the Foodbank. When connecting it to the arguments made in the previous chapter, the question arises: how do Karen and the other volunteers relate to the expectation of objectiveness and professionalism? As one will see later in this chapter and in the next, I have experienced Karen to be one of the volunteers that is most concerned with the objectivity of volunteers. That leads me to wonder: in which manners are the connections between motivations and morality understood in volunteers meaning-giving practices? It has been argued before that exactly the seemingly contrasting ideologies and motivations of performers of charity are used as a manner to construct meaning for one’s practices: “[l]iberal subjects c[an] only come into meaningful being because they [a]re able to think of themselves simultaneously as homo oeconomicus and homo relationalis, as animated [...] by both
rational, profit-driven, self-interested behaviour and various forms of disinterested love.” (Muehlebach 2012: 20). In this chapter I aim to show how the volunteers understand
humanitarian problems in society and how they see their role in solutions to these problems. I aim to show how volunteers see the morality of their own practices within a wider context than the Foodbank, combining the morality of objectiveness with a humanitarian aspiration of compassion. I provide a societal angle to the volunteers’ construction of their moral economy by offering an understanding of volunteers’ motivations and the manners in which they attach meaning to their work.
Civil society and its charity function
To understand how volunteers attach value to their work, it is important to know how they frame it in relation to the problem of poverty. Early in the fieldwork it already became clear that the Foodbank is often imagined as correcting a failing state in its task of care, as
expressed in this conversation with Peter.
Peter: “Do you know where the Foodbank comes from?” Roos: “Rotterdam right?”
Peter: *laughs* “Do you know how often I hear that? It is wrong. The Foodbank has existed for centuries.”
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Even though almost all other Foodbank volunteers did trace the origin of the organisation back to the couple in Rotterdam, that is not the issue here. It is more interesting to untangle what Peter is meaning to say when he traces the origin of the Foodbank back centuries:
It was actually the churches’ care for the poor. Then, about fifty years ago, the government decided that poverty was no longer a problem of the churches but a national one. Afterwards, the government did not do anything, and they still do not. So local initiatives took the task upon them; the couple in Rotterdam being an example of that with the Foodbank.
Peter frames the problem of poverty as a problem that has existed over centuries and for which the responsibility of care has shifted over time. He sees the involvement of civil society organisations, such as the Foodbanks and other charity institutions, as a necessary substitute for a state which is failing in its responsibility of care. This is a point that is stressed by most volunteers and I was taken aback by many of their statements, displaying their distrust in governmental institutions, while at the same time stressing the continuity of the problem of poverty and its constant need for care. Frederik, an older volunteer once explained what the main reason was he got involved at the Foodbank. “You know what they do?” he asked me, meaning the local civil servants: “they run opgeefpolitiek17 here. They just keep on feeding you paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. Then eventually you will just give up and they do not have to deal with your problems anymore.” Another volunteer explained the problem in a different way, seeing her involvement at the Foodbank as an active performance of care towards a deep-rooted problem, she asks me: “do you really believe that a society without poverty exists? It is better to help out than to sit back and ignore it.”. Even Harry, the national board member, links the problem of poverty to his perceived inability of the current society to provide the needed care: “I think we are moving towards an individualized society too much. We used to be able to solve a lot of problems by just helping each other out like a community. We have lost that and I feel that the Foodbank provides a place where this community value is held on to.” These are all explanations of volunteers’ involvement at Foodbank sites that I have often heard, connecting a failing of the state to the aptness of the close community in providing the needed care for a problem that has existed for centuries and will not be solved any time soon.
The above statements could be argued to relate to the concept of compassionate conservatism, which was originally designed in 1993 by Marvin Olasky, an American
17
A self-designed concept the interlocutor used to describe a governmental bureaucracy aimed at averting people from using their social arrangements.
