Abstract
Community food initiatives are gaining momentum. Across various geographical contexts, community food initiatives are self-organising, providing communities with inspiration, knowledge and the opportunity to work towards responsible and socially acceptable transformations in food systems. In this article, we explore how self-organisation manifests itself in the daily activities and developments of community food initiatives. Through the conceptual lens of community self-organisation, we aim to provide a more detailed understanding of how community food initiatives contribute to broader and transformational shifts in food systems. Drawing on a multi-method approach, including community-based participatory research, interviews and observations, this article follows the creation and creative dissolution of the Free Café—a surplus food sharing initiative in Groningen, the Netherlands, which in the eye of the public remains unified, but from the volunteers’ perspectives split up into three different initiatives. The results suggest that community self-organisation accommodates differing motivations and experiences embedded in the everyday collective performances of community rationalities and aspirations. This article also points to the changing individual and collective perspectives, vulnerabilities and everyday politics within community food initiatives. This paper contributes to emerging debates on community self-organising within food systems and the potential of community initiatives to promote broader social realignments.
Highlights
This article explores the role of community self-organisation when considering community food sharing initiatives
Looking at the everyday politics of the café and how internal differences lead to the rise of three initiatives, this study suggests that community self-organisation contributes to problem-solving and leads to the illumination of more pathways, more diversity in practices and more opportunities for social change
The results indicate that community self-organisation can contribute to emancipatory knowledge on the everyday politics within community initiative and how the dynamic interplay between intentions, perspectives and actions produce self-organised collective performances
Summary
This article explores the role of community self-organisation when considering community food sharing initiatives. Over the last few decades, the literature addressing processes of civic engagement within the broader strand of community action and grassroots initiatives has been growing Terms such as participatory society [6,7], big society [8], energetic society [9], active citizenship [10,11,12] and new acts of (urban) citizenship [13], among many others, have become popular. Such terms often convey innovative views on how to understand and analyse processes of community mobilisation, inclusivity and self-organisation. We construe community self-organisation within the context of community food initiatives
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