Abstract
This paper reports on an action research project about organizational change by a regional food bank in New York State’s southern tier. While the project team initially included a sociologist, food bank leadership and staff, it expanded to involve participants in food access programs and area college students. This paper combines findings from qualitative research about the food bank with findings generated through a collaborative inquiry about a ten-year process of organizational change. We ask how a regional food bank can change its approach to address root causes of hunger. Acknowledging that narrow, pragmatic definitions of hunger promote charitable responses, our collaboration is grounded in structural understandings of poverty that refuse to blame the poor or treat poverty as an accident. Decades-long economic restructuring, deindustrialization and a rise in the service economy have resulted in growing inequality and long-term demand for “emergency” food in New York State. We outline critiques by scholars and practitioners of the emergency food regime. Description and analysis of the organizational change efforts of the Food Bank of the Southern Tier combine discourse analysis, collaborative inquiry, interviews, and participant observation. Discourse analysis of the agency’s strategic plans documents changes in aspirations, exposure to new epistemic communities and repertoires of actions. Interviews with participants evidence impacts of the organization’s advocacy and education programs on people with lived experience in poverty. Through a participatory process, we developed a collaborative chronology of phases of organizational change. Collaborative analysis of organizational changes demonstrates new definitions of the problem, a shift in service focus, changing outcomes and increased funding for advocacy. While recognizing substantial constraints, this project contributes to evidence that food banks may shift their discourse and practices beyond charity.
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Notes
The core team includes the author, FBST President and CEO Natasha Thompson (subsequently referred to as the president), and staff, Randi Quackenbush and Lyndsey Lyman. They all contributed as described below, including by reviewing data and conclusions, making edits and comments. All errors, however, are mine.
This report draws from various projects with human participants, each of which received individual IRB approval under the following IRB numbers: 1215-06, 0217-16, and 0516-03. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Additional informed consent was obtained from all individual participants for whom identifying information is included in this article.
The official poverty measure is three times the inflation-adjusted cost of a minimum food diet, based on average family expenses in 1963 (U.S. Census Bureau 2017). The supplemental poverty measure (SPM) includes cash resources and noncash benefits from government programs (U.S. Census Bureau 2017). The Census also calculates deep poverty (Shaefer et al. 2012).
From 2009 to 2014, wage growth in leisure and hospitality was moderately above the inflation rate education and health was only moderately above (DiNapoli 2015).
Action Research, Participatory Research, Participatory Action Research, and Community-Based Research are a cluster of practices that all share common principles. They cross disciplines and address a range of problems, but all combine education, research and action (Hall 1979b in Park et al. 1993).
Many methods to address on poverty and hunger were developed in international development contexts.
These were senior seminars in sociology at Ithaca College. I taught Community Organizing in 2012 and 2015, and Inquiry and Action for Social Change in the spring semesters of 2016 to 2018.
While conventional social research seeks objectivity, action researchers follow the hermeneutical position that reality is subjective and social science aims to interpret reality (Greenwood and Levin 2007 p. 68). There is no set of methodological rules that can substitute for testing knowledge generated in practice. Therefore, our process was an interpretive one, aiming to achieve credibility and workability (Greenwood and Levin 2007, p. 81).
In Summer 2012, I collaborated with FBST’s curriculum committee to design their Hunger Education curriculum. I consulted with FBST staff to plan community focus groups with clients in Summer 2015, consulted to develop the Speaker’s Bureau training curriculum (from 2016 to present) and to design a management team training on root causes of poverty (Spring 2018). I conducted workshops on root causes, realities and theories of poverty for FBST staff and for SB trainings in Spring 2016 and 2017.
In 2012 and 2015, Community Organizing classes (senior sociology seminars) developed and piloted hunger education workshops for high school students, educating students and themselves on the realities of poverty and hunger. Later, I developed a 400-level Action Research class called Inquiry and Action for Social Change. In Spring 2016 and 2017, students in this class interviewed volunteers about their perceptions about clients; observed social interactions and conducted preliminary political-economic research. In Spring 2018, students developed sociological briefing papers for the FBST and SB graduates to provide sociological data about issues selected from SB graduates’ personal stories.
Strategic plans from 2005, 2007, 2010–2012 and 2017 were provided by the current FBST president. The first two were implemented under the prior president.
Social movement scholar Charles Tilly (2002) defines repertoires of contention as a set of performances by which any pair of politically constituted actors make claims on each other, which if realized, would affect their object’s interests.
Abbreviations
- AR:
-
Action research
- FBST:
-
Food bank of the Southern Tier
- SB:
-
Speaker’s Bureau, a project of the food bank of the Southern Tier
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Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the other members of the core team for their commitment and feedback throughout the research process. I am grateful for the energetic involvement of participants in FBST’s Speaker’s Bureau, students from my Inquiry and Action class, and graduate assistant Rachelle Sartori, who contributed to the development of portions of this research. I also thank the core team, Tim Shenk, Diane Swords and Pamela Sertzen for feedback on drafts. Portions of this research were funded by the Ithaca College Center for Faculty Excellence and the Ithaca College Center for Civic Engagement.
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Swords, A. Action research on organizational change with the Food Bank of the Southern Tier: a regional food bank’s efforts to move beyond charity. Agric Hum Values 36, 849–865 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09949-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09949-8