At one of my previous food pantries, we had a volunteer who was perpetually cheerful, eternally welcoming to clients, and one of the most compassionate individuals I could have chosen for our team. This individual was also a client who regularly used our services.
They always made a special effort to greet the clients waiting in line two full hours before we opened. When I expressed my appreciation, this volunteer explained that as a shopper they loved our team’s welcoming habit of checking on those waiting in line. They wanted all our visitors to feel the same way: like an equal, appreciated, and respected. This client-volunteer’s efforts transformed our shoppers’ food pantry visits from a degrading and shameful experience into a moment of feeling dignified and respected.
Unfortunately, even in 2024, judgement, bias and “otherization” still permeate the policies and practices of many anti-hunger and community support organizations in the United States.
As an example, some anti-hunger leaders and organizations still discourage volunteering by their own clients. Allowing clients to be insiders, they argue, increases the risk of conflict of interest, abuse of power, and manipulation of the food supply.
In my years managing food pantries, I’ve seen all these unfortunate behaviors. However, I’ve never once witnessed this type of behavior from client volunteers. I have regularly witnessed it from advantaged and entitled volunteers or non-profit supporters with no lived experience. And too often, I’ve been instructed by leadership to ignore these negative behaviors, especially if confronting them risked alienating donors or friends of the “inner circle,” while also being responsible for ensuring my clients don’t violate the same rules. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these policies reinforce the attitude that people facing food insecurity can’t be trusted, and should depend on the wisdom and leadership of others.
This baseless concern about client volunteers is just one way that we project our biases and assumptions about hunger onto clients without any real basis in reality. We are long overdue to abandon these assumptions about food insecurity.
As Americans, we’ve been conditioned to assume that people who use welfare or need food assistance are untrustworthy, unreliable, and make poor choices.
As a result, most elements of food pantry and emergency food assistance policy are based on this assumption- that we must protect these programs from abuse and corruption, instead of ensuring families have the food they need to thrive. Turning away volunteers with lived experience deprives organizations of essential insights and perpetuates the stigma and discrimination that accompany hunger.
Having clients serve as volunteers can be uncomfortable because their presence and input requires us to check our biases and pay closer attention to the experience of being a food pantry client. Clients serving as volunteers gives food pantries an opportunity to learn their weaknesses and strive to do better, if we can foster the humility for this lesson.
But it’s also essential to make sure that we are not using these clients as our primary sounding board for educating on dignity. In the same misguided way that too many people called on their friends of color to educate them in racial justice issues in 2020, it’s important we do the work to research and learn the reality of hunger without exploiting our community.
As someone without lived experience of hunger, I try to provide services that I have never myself depended on.
As a result, it’s easy for me and my colleagues to fall victim to the assumptions and biases that abound surrounding food insecurity and food assistance.
This is why building spaces for those with lived experience to safely speak up is essential, and why it’s important to evaluate whether your organization is a safe space for that vulnerability.
If we can transform our anti-hunger institutions into centers of humility and compassion for continual growth, we can amplify our impact by moving beyond assumption to ensure we’re addressing the problems our neighbors face, and not the ones we think they do.
Major appreciation to Kern Herron for his input on the writing of this post.
The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
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Reintroducing justice and dignity to the fight to end hunger 