From Charity to Dignity: the Development of the Community Food Centre Model
One important lesson from Complexity Theory is that an intervention or innovation will not work uniformly across all contexts (Zimmerman et al., 2001); from the perspective of organizations as complex adaptive systems (CAS), an organization’s successes are highly dependent on the environment and context within which they developed. Thus, in order to better understand organizations — especially those that have succeeded — we must look to their environment, historical context, and the values and principles with which organizations made decisions and navigated their world.
Today, I want to share with you the story of Robert, and how the Stop Community Food Centre changed his life:
“When Robert first came to the drop-in meal program at The Stop, he was fighting mad. A former metalworker, he had suffered an injury that left him unable to work and struggling with chronic pain. He was losing his housing and had not been able to access disability benefits. What Stop staff saw at first was a man who started fights and spoke so abusively to the people who tried to help him that they wondered whether he should be barred from all but The Stop’s emergency programs.” (Scharf et al., 2010, p.8)
Robert’s story may seem exceptional, yet, the vicious trap of poverty is a situation that many people in our communities find themselves in. In Hamilton, and Toronto, Canada, the 2 cities where I study and live, the poverty rate stands between 15–20% (Wakefield et al., 2012). One of the many serious challenges associated with living in poverty is food insecurity; not having available and adequate access at all times to adequate, healthy, and nutritious food (United Nations World Food Program).
In the early 1980s, a new type of organization was developed in order to address the challenges of food insecurity in North America: the food bank. Food banks were at once an attractive idea. Not only would they help address the humanitarian notion that no one should go hungry in a wealthy society, they could also prevent the unnecessary waste of food (Saul & Curtis, 2013).
In Canada, the first food bank opened up in Edmonton in 1981, after several nonprofit organizations coalesced to address difficult circumstances created by the economic recession (Saul & Curtis, 2013). In these early days, food banks were perceived to be a short-term, emergency solution; the expectation was that food banks would eventually “run themselves out of business”, and that they would fade into history once the crisis was over. However, the demand for emergency food services did not stop growing. By the mid 1980s, there were over 94 food banks across Canada, and by the early 1990s, over 292 (Saul & Curtis, 2013). Today, food banks and emergency food operations are ubiquitous across Canada, inconspicuously woven into the fabric of our communities.
The Stop, originally a church-led food-distribution project in Toronto’s downtown core, was incorporated as a food bank in the 1980s, recognizing the growing demand for social assistance in their diverse immigrant community (Levkoe & Wakefield, 2011). When Nick Saul — a young man who had prior worked for a homeless shelter and public housing complex — stepped into his new role as manager of the Stop food bank in 1998, he immediately began to notice the limitations of the food bank model. Some of these limitations included their inability to address growing hunger needs, a mismatch between what users desire and what the food banks can supply, nutritional inadequacy, an inherent instability in a system dependent on charitable donations from individual and corporate donors, as well as the cost to human dignity in receiving handouts (Wakefield et al., 2012).
Furthermore, a highly influential argument by American sociologist Janet Poppendieck in her 1998 book Sweet Charity, posited that that food banks and similar emergency food initiatives allow the state to “roll back” from the provision of social assistance (Poppendieck, 1998). The substitution of publicly provided services with private nonprofit initiatives is consistent with a neoliberal governing ideology, and may be interpreted as an evasion of responsibility for ensuring that all citizens have adequate access to food (Wakefield et al., 2012).
Saul shares a similar perspective in his 2013 book,
“…instead of regarding food banks as the embodiment of a good deed — a compassionate response to hunger in an affluent society — I think we should view these small, ephemeral, volunteer-run places serving up inadequate, unhealthy food as symbols of the breakdown of our social fabric, the end of whatever collective understanding we have about our responsibility to each other” (Saul & Curtis, 2013, p.77)
As Saul and the leadership of the Stop began to recognize the limitations of a short-term, charity-based model, they began to incorporate more social and political initiatives. In 2001, the organisation changed its name to The Stop Community Food Centre and moved to the Davenport West neighbourhood in Toronto — a community with one of the most diverse immigrant populations in Canada, as well as above-average rates of unemployment and low-income (Levkoe & Wakefield, 2011).
They operated a food bank and drop-in meal programs with an emphasis on fresh, healthy food, as a means to improve people’s health and build morale. As time went on, staff began to recognize the broader impacts that The Stop CFC was having, by using food as an entry-point in building social ties and support networks in their communities. Today, The Stop operates emergency food programs, a range of educational and capacity-building programs such as community kitchens and community gardens, as well as civic-engagement programs that supports community members and allows them to advocate for political issues affecting their own neighbourhood (Saul & Curtis, 2013).
Let’s return to the story of Robert; how was The Stop able to help him? Aggravated, in pain, and resentful, there seemed to be very few options that could help him:
“The community advocacy coordinator decided to make a last-ditch effort to work with him to address his issues. With her help, he got medical care to manage his pain, secured disability benefits, and found stable housing. Eventually he expressed an interest in volunteering. The volunteer coordinator enlisted the community garden coordinator to put him to work in the garden, in what they hoped would be a soothing environment. Gardening struck a chord with him, and he became an enthusiastic participant in The Stop’s gardening program, getting involved with an art project and dusting off some landscaping skills to help out relandscaping the front garden beds at The Stop. Inspired by The Stop’s ‘Yes in My Backyard’ project, Robert is now hoping to get his landlord’s permission to transform his backyard into a vegetable garden that can be cultivated by someone without access to a garden. (Scharf et al., 2010, p. 8)”
As evident in Robert’s story, the principles that drive The Stop are fourfold (Levkoe & Wakefield, 2011):
1. A Community Food Centre is committed to a broad set of values: antipoverty, ecological sustainability, food and wellness, and community building.
This bigger-picture, more integrative approach contrasts the issues-focused approach that most emergency food programs tend to employ. This is reflected in the diversity of their services; their food programs address hunger needs, and simultaneously work to improve the health of participants as well as to provide livelihoods to local suppliers. Hands-on programs (e.g. community gardens, food skills workshops) address issues of food access and healthy living. There are also community advocacy efforts, a direct attempt to address the root causes of poverty in the community.
2. A Community Food Centre provides a physical space for food-related activities, sharing of knowledge and resources, and community organizing.
These types of spaces can be conceptualized as community hubs (Government of Ontario, 2009), which have the following features:
- Through clustering of services, community hubs create synergies and efficiencies for service providers and service users — access to, and awareness of community services are enhanced when services are integrated in a community hub (research cited). In the story of Robert, we saw how the ability to access emergency food, social support, and gardening programs in one location helped to address his multifaceted needs.
- The interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of community hubs enables staff to gain a better, more holistic understanding of the needs and dynamics within community.
- Community hubs can also become a community-space for residents to meet, socialize, and become engaged in their community. This function is vital as studies have shown that as social cohesion increases, mortality rates, suicide, and poor general and mental health decrease (Stafford et al., 2003)
3. A Community Food Centre contributes to the development of a more equitable and sustainable food distribution system, by procuring quality food for a subsidized cost for its program users, while providing fair pay to local and sustainable food suppliers.
4. A Community Food Centre works to engage people in the politics of their everyday lives, by making connections from food to broader social, political, and ecological issues.
In conclusion, The Stop Community Food Centre is an organization that saw the limitations of the status-quo, and transformed itself to meet broader and pressing challenges in its community. Along the way, its leaders made decisions according to important values and principles, and adapted its programs to meet the needs of community members. Most importantly, The Stop acted as a catalyst for the formation of networks of meaningful relationships and support; enabling and empowering individual members, and in the process, creating a cohesive, healthy, and thriving community.
Next time, we will examine more explicit comparisons between the Community Food Centre model and the tenets of complexity theory.
Works Cited
Government of Ontario. (2009). Stronger, healthier communities (Chapter 2). Breaking the Cycle: Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Retrieved from http://www.Ontario.ca/breakingthecycle
Levkoe, C., & Wakefield, S. (2011). The Community Food Centre: Creating space for a just, sustainable, and healthy food system. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 249–268. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2011.021.012
Poppendieck, J. (1999). Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. Penguin Publishing Group. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=yYYKbozUD70C
Saul, N., & Curtis, A. (2014). The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement. Random House of Canada.
Scharf, K., Levkoe, C., & Saul, N. (2010). “In every community a place for food: The role of the Community Food Centre in building a local, sustainable and just food system.” Metcalf Food Solutions Paper. Retrieved from http://metcalffoundation.com/stories/publications/in-every-community-a-place-for-food-the-role-of-the-community-food-centre-in-building-a-local-sustainable-and-just-food-system/.
Stafford, M., Bartley, M., Sacker, A., Marmot, M., Wilkinson, R., Boreham, R., & Thomas, R. (2003). Measuring the Social Environment: Social Cohesion and Material Deprivation in English and Scottish Neighbourhoods. Environment and Planning A, 35(8), 1459–1475. https://doi.org/10.1068/a35257
What is food security? | WFP | United Nations World Food Programme — Fighting Hunger Worldwide. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.wfp.org/node/359289
Wakefield, S., Fleming, J., Klassen, C., & Skinner, A. (2013). Sweet Charity, revisited: Organizational responses to food insecurity in Hamilton and Toronto, Canada. Critical Social Policy, 33(3), 427–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018312458487
Zimmerman, B., Lindberg, C., & Plsek, P. E. (2001). Edgeware: Insights from Complexity Science for Health Care Leaders. VHA Incorporated. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=N63MAAAACAAJ
